Before there was a national chain, a house brand or a website with several dozen categories, there was a shopping list. In 1987, Mumbai businessman Naresh Khatar went looking for things for his newborn daughter, Mamta. The city had the goods, but not in one place. Completing the errand meant visiting several shops. Khatar saw a retail problem hiding inside a domestic nuisance: early parenthood was already complicated, and the market made it more so.
His first answer arrived in 1989 as Mamta Collections, a 50-square-foot shop in Santa Cruz funded with ₹5 lakh. It stocked newborn needs under one roof and borrowed its name from the daughter who inspired it. Five years later, after sales and customer requests outgrew the room, Khatar moved into a much larger Juhu store and renamed it Me N Moms. The date the company recognizes as its beginning is May 8, 1994.
The early details read like small-business anthropology. The Juhu shop was air-conditioned when that was still unusual. Khatar kept his original staff because they understood the products and the customers. He noticed working couples could not shop when stores closed on Sundays, so he rotated employees and opened seven days a week. None of this was glamorous. All of it removed friction.
The store learned what the label could make
Me N Moms first expanded sideways. Mamta Collections had already attracted wholesale orders; by 1995, the B2B operation needed its own Khar office. The company imported and consolidated infant products, including Singapore’s Tollyjoy, and supplied other stores in Mumbai and Delhi. For almost a decade, Me N Moms remained one shop attached to a growing distribution business. Then malls changed Indian retail. A second outlet opened at Inorbit Mall in Malad in 2004, followed by expansion into other cities.
The decisive move came in 2006 with Mee Mee, the company’s own baby and mother-care label. Here was the advantage of years behind the counter: Me N Moms had watched parents compare prices, ask how products worked and worry about safety. It did not need to guess at the assortment. Mee Mee eventually stretched across feeding bottles, sterilizers, diapers, wipes, lotions, oral care, grooming kits, toys, carriers, strollers, high chairs, cribs, bedding, maternity lingerie and more.
“International quality at an affordable price is the key USP of our brand.”Naresh Khatar, founder and managing director
The positioning was deliberately practical. In 2012, Khatar said Mee Mee products were priced 20 to 30 percent below competing brands. He also said the label supplied roughly 75 percent of company turnover in the previous year. That number is old, but strategically revealing: the house brand had become the economic center of a business that started by stocking other people’s goods.
A short customer window, a very long shelf
Most Me N Moms customers enter during pregnancy and graduate a few years later. That compressed relationship creates an odd retail challenge: the company must win trust quickly, serve many unfamiliar needs at once and keep acquiring the next cohort of parents. Breadth is its answer. A shopper can arrive for a nursing bra, return for a feeding bottle, add a diaper backpack, then move through rattles, walkers and travel gear as the child grows.
The problem being solved is not simply product availability. It is cognitive load. New parents often do not know which object they need, how long they will use it or what a safety label covers. Me N Moms organizes stores around activities such as feeding and bathing, trains staff to demonstrate products and uses descriptions online to do similar explanatory work. Its value is partly curatorial: converting an intimidating universe of small decisions into one legible shop.
Safety is central to the promise because baby products invite scrutiny that ordinary household goods do not. The company says Mee Mee items undergo testing against relevant ASTM, European EN and Indian BIS or ISI standards, and it emphasizes non-toxic, lead-free materials and rounded edges. Standards apply differently across categories, so parents still need to read the label on the particular item. The commercial point is broader: reassurance is part of the product.
Tactile shopping, product demonstrations and immediate trust at company and franchise locations.
Own-label products create range, recognizable design and greater control over price and supply.
Regional distributors place the brand in independent baby stores and pharmacies beyond the chain.
Direct ordering extends the aisle nationwide and lets shoppers browse by category or child age.
Four roads lead to the same nursery
Me N Moms is both retailer and supplier. It earns from its own stores and online catalog, sells proprietary Mee Mee products through those channels, distributes the label to baby shops and chemists, and expands its physical network with franchise partners. The company’s franchise offer currently advertises more than 140 stores, more than 60 franchisees and over 10 million customers. It asks operators for roughly 1,000 square feet and ₹30 lakh to ₹40 lakh of investment, then supports property selection, layout, recruitment, training and launch marketing.
This hybrid model solves a geographic problem. A specialist chain cannot place a full-sized store everywhere, but a feeding bottle or packet of wipes can travel through a distributor to a neighborhood chemist. Ecommerce covers another part of the map. During the pandemic, the company added WhatsApp ordering and described an online-to-offline system that routed orders to stores for faster dispatch. The channels are not separate experiments; they are different ways to monetize the same product knowledge.
Scale claims vary because the network has changed and company pages were updated at different moments. The useful sequence is clear. Me N Moms had 11 company-owned stores and one franchise in 2012, reported 60 operating stores in 2016, and said it had 135 stores across 69 cities when it opened 12 more in 2021. Its current franchise pitch says 140 stores nationwide. Distribution figures likewise rise from thousands of outlets on older pages to more than 40,000 baby stores and pharmacies in its current LinkedIn description.
The marketSpecialist retail in the shadow of a marketplace
The Indian baby-products market contains several kinds of rival. FirstCry offers marketplace-scale assortment and a wide store footprint. Mothercare and Chicco bring international specialist recognition. LuvLap, R for Rabbit and Pigeon compete across gear and feeding. Himalaya Baby, Mamaearth and The Moms Co concentrate more heavily on personal care. Me N Moms sits between these models: broader than a single-category brand, more tactile than a pure ecommerce shelf and more locally value-oriented than many international names.
Search attention is not evenly distributed
Share of the measured FY2025 search-volume set, percent. Mee Mee ranked fifth among the brands in Techmagnate’s baby-products study. Bars use FirstCry as the visual maximum.
The chart shows the asymmetry. In Techmagnate’s FY2025 study, FirstCry held 73.8 percent of measured brand search volume. Mee Mee ranked fifth at 3.06 percent, with 45,700 searches, up 9.73 percent from the prior year. Me N Moms itself registered separately at 0.96 percent. That split is telling: the product label has a consumer identity distinct from the store that created it.
Differentiation, then, is less about owning the internet than joining physical service, local distribution and a broad house brand. Stores reveal what parents ask. The brand converts those questions into products. Wholesale moves those products past the limits of the store network. Online retail fills in time and distance. It is a flywheel assembled before people routinely called retail systems flywheels.
What enduresThe business still begins at the counter
Me N Moms describes itself as a ₹200 crore brand, while private-company records place FY2024 operating revenue within a broad ₹100 crore to ₹500 crore band. LinkedIn lists 501 to 1,000 employees. It remains privately held, and no institutional funding round surfaced in its public history. This is a company built mainly through retail cash flow, supplier relationships, franchise capital and patient geographic expansion rather than a familiar venture-backed growth script.
Its public culture leans toward service and continuity. The company describes mystery-shopping audits, post-purchase customer calls and franchise training. Recent LinkedIn posts show employee events, internal celebrations and active marketing recruitment. AmbitionBox named it a top-rated mid-sized retail workplace in its 2026 Employee Choice Awards, based on 2025 reviews, with a 3.99 rating. The company also announced a 2026-27 Brand of the Year recognition from Marksmen Daily.
Mamta Collections
A tiny Santa Cruz shop puts newborn supplies under one roof.
Me N Moms
The larger Juhu flagship gives the retail idea its lasting name.
Mee Mee
The retailer becomes a brand owner with its own affordable product line.
A 12-store wave
Openings across six states bring the reported network to 135 locations.
Thirty-plus years in
The company adds workplace and brand recognition to its long retail record.
The central insight has barely changed since Khatar’s first shopping trip. Parents do not experience feeding, bathing, travel and sleep as neatly separated industries. They experience them as Tuesday. A retailer that gathers those jobs, explains the tools and keeps prices within reach can sell more than convenience. It sells a little composure at a moment when composure is scarce.