Baby Sensory

Flying Start discovers how and why Baby Sensory grew to become a global, award-winning business in such a short space of time

The Baby Sensory concept was conceived in 2002 by Dr. Lin Day who observed how babies responded to activities designed for their older siblings. As a result of this observation, she decided to design a programme specifically for babies.

In 2006, Day decided to take the Baby Sensory concept, which had evolved over four years, and make it more widely available. Along with her husband, she entered into a partnership with Keeley and Ian Sharland and Baby Sensory was formed.

It was decided that the best approach for growth was to franchise the Baby Sensory programme, operating the franchise model, streamlining, automating and contracting out all non-core activity services.” Far more people are now seeing franchising as a way to take full advantage of a new idea or concept,” said Ian Sharland, one of the company’s directors. “This offers franchisees the opportunity to start a business with a tried and tested model and allows the franchisor the opportunity to attract highly motivated people to run their programme thus enabling more rapid expansion,” he added.

The programme, which the team won three awards for in the What’s On 4 Awards for children’s activities early in 2011, now runs in 16 countries and seven languages. The opening of a Baby Sensory centre in China is cited as one the biggest achievements for the company, as well as the launch of our Toddler Sense programme for 1 to 3 year olds at the start of 2010.

Baby Sensory is most popular among parents with babies from birth to 13 months in the UK, where it has 100 class leaders running Baby Sensory Classes in over 300 locations. Now, one in every 60 babies born in the UK attends Baby Sensory every week and the company expects the number of babies attending its classes to continue to grow for the foreseeable future the programme is made available in more communities.

Since the company was launched in 2006, the economic climate in the UK has been challenging. However, the directors and their franchisees have maintained a positive outlook throughout this time and consequently the Baby Sensory business has seen substantial growth every year. “When we launched Baby Sensory there were very few activities for parents with newborn babies and consequently we had very strong early growth,” said Sharland. Since then, many organisations in the sector have either adapted their programmes to meet the needs of newborn babies or tried to develop their own programmes to compete with Baby Sensory.

According to Sharland, it is essential now more than ever for companies to maintain market leadership through clear focus on research and development to remain ahead of the competition. Sharland has witnessed a great deal of interest in early years development and also in the creation of cohesive local communities. “During our formative years, the UK government invested heavily in Sure Start centres as focal points for the community, this created opportunity for our franchisees to run classes in these centres.”

With the more recent government cuts, however, many Sure Start centres no longer have the budget to fund external provision of programmes and many have attempted to develop their own programmes. “From a UK macroeconomic perspective, this is disappointing as it creates a government funded competitor for businesses who are developing world leading programmes which could be exported,” said Sharland.

Baby Sensory plans to continue with its substantial growth in the UK and overseas with both existing and new programmes. “We are particularly excited that many of our franchisees now run more than one territory as we are passionate about offering opportunity to grow to our most successful franchisees.”

Looking ahead, the company has a product launch planned for the middle of 2012 and although the team isn’t in a position to provide details at this stage, it is believed that the launch will have a “significant impact” in the market place.