She might look like any other mum dropping her kids at the school gate, but Rhian Allen is also the founder of a multimillion-dollar business.
Her health and fitness website, The Healthy Mummy, turns over $12 million a year, and is on track to reach revenues of $15 million next year. Allen has well over 1 million mothers in her community, whom she says she is empowering to live a healthier life.
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Targeting the mummy market
The Healthy Mummy founder, Rhian Allen, has built a community to support mothers who want to lead a healthy lifestyle.
Recipe for success
The Healthy Mummy website offers mothers family-friendly meal plans created by nutritionists, exercise ideas, daily support and a range of products such as shakes, protein powders. The business adds 100 new recipes to the website every month and sells 50,000 books a year.
The site employs 23 full-time staff (including Allen's husband) and a further 100 part-time consultants and nutritionists, making it a pretty substantial operation. Allen claims to have helped Australian women lose 20 million kilos since launching seven years ago.
![Kimberley Smith had a range of exercise apps in a variety of disciplines on her phone, and decided to pull all of these ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170812185139im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/r/j/6/5/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxriv4.png/1502311789203.jpg)
She has a background in media and launched the business while six months' pregnant after noticing a gap in the market for fitness and meal plans for mothers.
The Sydney mother of two has no investors, has never gone into debt and has ploughed earnings back into the business. She is investing in her first television commercial this year.
"Our niche is mothers, but you've got to remember that mothers are the biggest niche that exists," she says.
"We know that women don't like feeling as though they're buying from a corporation, and [they] join our community as part of a wider lifestyle change. Each customer spends an average of $100 with us. We've got massive repeat visitation and a very low churn rate."
![Rhian Allen, founder of The Healthy Mummy website, which has a million members and adds 100 new recipes every month.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170812185139im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/r/j/6/6/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gxriv4.png/1502311789203.jpg)
She regularly works on new product launches and mitigates associated risks by giving her community a sneak peek of new products to create early customer buy-in, which helps shore up sales, she says. Activewear and a breastfeeding range are on the cards next, she says.
"What we've created has really resonated with mums. We never cut corners, and we always listen to our customers.""
![Kimberley Smith's The Fit Mummy Project app clocked up over 1000 downloads in the first few weeks after launch.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170812185139im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/r/j/6/2/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gxriv4.png/1502311789203.jpg)
Exercise in a pocket
Fellow Sydneysider left behind a corporate lawyer career to dip her toe into the same pond, recently launching The Fit Mummy Project app.
Early signs are good. The paid app clocked up over 1000 downloads in the first few weeks after launch. Smith is also developing her career as an influencer on Instagram and sells e-books on her website, which are her biggest income stream.
Our niche is mothers, but you've got to remember that mothers are the biggest niche that exists.
Rhian Allen
Smith had a range of exercise apps in a variety of disciplines on her phone, and decided to pull all of these into one app and aim it at new mums.
"Young mums want to be able to access fitness without all the stress of going to a class, and I'm giving them all of that in their pocket," she says.
Smith is no stranger to the fitness space, co-owning an exercise business in Sydney called the East Side Crew until a couple of years ago, which was turning over about $400,000 a year.
Rise of the health and wellness sector
Mother of two Tara O'Connell has also aimed her app at mothers, selling The Baby Diaries to TerryWhite Chemmart for an undisclosed sum recently, providing proof of concept to other pharmacy groups.
Colette McShane launched high-intensity workout classes in Melbourne in 2013, which offer fitness sessions around Victoria. She trademarked The HIIT Factory as a brand in early 2015 and has since opened seven franchised workout studios. Other revenue streams include meal plans and merchandise.
Marketing to Mums founder and chief executive Katrina McCarter has noticed a real drive in the health and wellness sector in recent years, with a number of successful mothers forging businesses in this space.
Anyone who thinks that mums aren't a big enough market should check their facts. There are 6,227,000 mothers in Australia, while a further 140,000 join the ranks of motherhood each year, her own research reveals.
"Mums are the powerhouse of our economy. They're responsible for more than 80 per cent of consumer spending," McCarter says.
"Women also don't like how they're treated by corporate Australia, with 63 per cent saying that marketers don't understand them. They want real connections that matter to them. And they're far more likely to take a recommendation from another mum than from a TV commercial," she adds.
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