Once Struggled with Her Son’s Diaper Rash, This Mumbai Mom Builds India’s #1 Cloth Diaper Brand; Hits Rs 100 Crore in ARR

In 2016, when Mumbai-based Pallavi Utagi couldn’t find convenient diapers for her son, Kabir, who is now 12 years old, she began wondering why parents had such limited practical and baby-friendly options in the market.

At the time, the Indian diaper market was largely dominated by disposable diapers, and cloth diapering was still a niche concept. Determined to change this, she founded SuperBottoms in the same year.

“When I started SuperBottoms, people told me Indian parents would never switch back to cloth diapers. But I believed that if we made them easy to use, comfortable for babies, and affordable for parents, they would choose it for the betterment of their children and the planet,” Pallavi Utagi tells Startup Pedia in an exclusive interview.

Today, along with cloth diapers, SuperBottoms offers a wide range of baby and kids’ essentials. Its portfolio includes potty training pants, bedwetting diapers for older kids, langots, swim diapers, supersoft underwear for kids, and diaper bags for travel.

The brand also sells baby wipes, eco-friendly detergent sheets specially designed for washing cloth diapers, changing mats, and other daily baby care accessories.

Since its inception, SuperBottoms has served more than 20 lakh parents across India.

"The business achievement I am most proud of is that we have prevented at least 750 million disposable diapers from going into landfills. Every disposable diaper stays on the planet for 500 years, so stopping that plastic waste is a huge milestone," she tells Startup Pedia.

About the Founder & CEO of SuperBottoms, Pallavi Utagi

Born and raised in a typical middle-class family in Nashik, Maharashtra, Pallavi Utagi earned her Bachelor of Engineering (Electronics and Telecom) from COEP Technological University, Pune, and later pursued an MBA in Marketing from the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai. 

She began her career as a software engineer at Infosys before holding marketing and brand management roles at major pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, including Strides Arcolab and Piramal Healthcare, where she gained experience in business strategy, consumer behavior, and product positioning. 

However, in 2016, motherhood changed her career path. When she struggled to find safe and practical diapering options for her son, she decided to leave her stable job and build a solution herself. 

Starting from scratch, Pallavi built SuperBottoms by focusing on product innovation, customer education, and sustainable manufacturing in India.

Beyond business growth, Pallavi is passionate about creating flexible work opportunities for mothers and promoting eco-conscious parenting.

"When you are building the company, the company is also building you. Every time we grew, I had to learn and bring myself up to the challenge. Today, I know that a problem is not a life-and-death situation; a solution always exists," the founder tells Startup Pedia.

Building a Mother-Led Workforce

In the early days of SuperBottoms, hiring experienced professionals was not easy. One day, Pallavi came across a professional mother who was on maternity leave and doing digital marketing work. 

The mother shared her struggle; she couldn’t return to the office because she had a small baby and no childcare support. Pallavi immediately offered her an opportunity to work from home for SuperBottoms as a digital marketing executive, handling content creation and social media.

Instead of building a traditional office-heavy team, Pallavi Utagi began reaching out to more mothers who were on maternity leave or had stepped away from full-time jobs after childbirth. 

Many of them were qualified and experienced but needed flexible, work-from-home opportunities. Pallavi offered them roles in customer support, social media management, content, operations, and community engagement.

She mentioned that this decision was not just about saving costs; it was about alignment. Mothers understood the product better than anyone else. They could genuinely relate to customer concerns, respond with empathy, and even provide product feedback from personal experience.

Over time, this approach became a defining strength of SuperBottoms. The company built a distributed, remote-first team across India, with more than 20 mothers managing customer care alone.

"I got some of the smartest people working on my brand very early on, and all I had to offer them was flexibility. Today, I have 20 mothers managing my customer care from their homes across India," SuperBottoms Founder & CEO says.

Challenges Pallavi Faced while Building SuperBottoms

One of the initial challenges faced by SuperBottoms was changing customer mindsets. In 2016, disposable diapers dominated the Indian market, and reusable cloth diapers were often seen as outdated or inconvenient. 

Many people questioned whether modern parents would be willing to wash and reuse diapers. 

Pallavi had to spend significant time educating customers about cost savings, skin safety, and environmental benefits before they were ready to try the product. 

She addressed major doubts and concerns by connecting directly with customers and engaging her initial mother workforce.

Coming from a middle-class family, Pallavi also faced taunts from relatives and close ones for leaving a stable corporate career to build a venture from scratch. 

However, she remained determined and confident, drawing on the startup lessons she had learned early in her career, particularly taking ownership and responsibility.

"The biggest challenge is always convincing people that you're quitting a monthly income to start something with zero income. There was a lot of skepticism, but you just have to have conviction in your idea," Pallavi tells Startup Pedia.

On the manufacturing and production front, Pallavi faced significant hurdles in finding the right suppliers, training them to meet quality standards, and developing innovative designs, all of which required patience and persistence. 

Managing a growing startup while raising a young child demanded constant adjustment, resilience, and discipline.

The Internal Betrayal 

In 2019, Pallavi Utagi faced a tough situation. A sales executive who had access to the company’s supply chain details, product designs, and strategies decided to leave and launch a similar product.

For a young startup, this felt like a betrayal and a serious business threat. Instead of getting into legal fights or public arguments, Pallavi chose to focus on improving her product. 

She believed that if someone copies you, they are always copying your old version. So, SuperBottoms was already working on making its diapers better, improving absorbency, comfort, and overall quality.

"I always feel that the biggest blessings come in disguise. We fast-tracked our upgraded design, and by the time the copycat product came into the market, it was already obsolete," she says.

This incident pushed the company to move faster and innovate more. Pallavi also focused on building a strong community of mothers around the brand, knowing that while products can be copied, trust and community cannot.

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Initial Journey of Pallavi Utagi

Founded in 2016, SuperBottoms was bootstrapped by Pallavi Utagi with around Rs 24 lakh of her personal savings. She started operations from a spare room in her Mumbai home and tested over 200 reusable diaper prototypes before launching the final product. 

In the initial phase, manufacturing was outsourced to units abroad, particularly in China, to produce technically efficient diapers. 

Over time, Pallavi shifted towards building a strong network of Indian contract manufacturers, investing heavily in quality training and co-developing products despite early resistance from larger factories. 

Marketing in the early days was community-driven, with Pallavi reaching out directly to mothers through Facebook groups and WhatsApp communities to educate them about cloth diapering. Word of mouth became the biggest growth driver. 

The business began taking off as more parents experienced the benefits of rash prevention, cost savings, and sustainability. 

By FY21, SuperBottoms had recorded revenue of around Rs 22 crore and sold over a million diapers, marking its first major growth phase driven by repeat customers and strong community referrals.

The Reality of Make in India

While SuperBottoms’ early products were manufactured in China, Pallavi soon realised the need to shift production locally to improve turnaround speed, reduce transportation costs, and enable small-batch manufacturing. 

However, truly embracing the Make in India initiative for a highly innovative product came with significant operational hurdles.

Pallavi discovered that while India has an established manufacturing ecosystem and abundant labor for standard garments, like t-shirts and basic underwear, producing modern, reusable cloth diapers required a completely different, specialised skill set. There was a severe lack of ready-to-work skilled labor for such complex, innovative designs.

She invested substantial time, energy, and capital into personally developing local suppliers and training their workforce from scratch, ensuring they could meet the brand's stringent quality and design standards.

She emphasised the importance of providing training and development to the labour force in line with growing industries, emerging trends, and market needs to make Make in India truly successful.

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Solving the Lifetime Value (LTV) Challenge

One of the interesting problems that Pallavi Utagi identified was that her core product, reusable cloth diapers, was extremely durable and designed to last for years. As a result, a highly satisfied customer might not need to make another purchase for a long time.

This raised a critical question among her investors, who asked how she planned to maintain the Lifetime Value (LTV) of her customers. 

To ensure the business remained scalable without compromising the quality of the diapers, Pallavi realised that the brand needed to grow alongside the child. 

Instead of relying solely on the infant stage, SuperBottoms expanded its portfolio to cater to various phases of a child's life. 

As their core demographic of babies grew into toddlers and young kids, the company introduced potty training pants, bamboo underwear, langots, pajamas, and joggers.

Furthermore, taking their eco-friendly ethos a step further, the brand began utilising scrap fabric from their manufacturing process to create upcycled toys. 

This strategic expansion allowed SuperBottoms to retain its loyal customer base for years, effectively solving the LTV challenge while staying true to its sustainable roots.

Navigating Tier-2 and Tier-3 Markets

As production scaled, SuperBottoms set its sights on expanding its footprint beyond metropolitan hubs and into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. 

In doing so, Pallavi had to navigate a common industry misconception: the belief that consumers in these markets only want cheap products.

Through her experience, Pallavi found this to be entirely untrue, especially in the baby care segment. 

Parents in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities possessed both the purchasing power and the mindset to spend on high-quality items for their children. The actual hurdle was not affordability, but accessibility.

"There is a misconception that in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, people only want cheap products. Especially for baby products, parents there absolutely have the mindset and the purchasing power to spend on quality; the challenge is simply distribution," Mumbai-based CEO tells Startup Pedia.

Because SuperBottoms initially lacked a widespread offline distribution network, the brand had to rely heavily on online channels. 

However, online distribution and delivery logistics in smaller cities were often slow compared to the rapid fulfillment seen in Tier 1 metros. 

The core challenge shifted from convincing parents to buy to simply ensuring the products could reach them efficiently. 

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The Philosophy of Disciplined Growth

As SuperBottoms continues to expand across the country, Pallavi remains steadfast in her commitment to what she calls ‘disciplined growth.’ 

For her, this means scaling sustainably, being prudent with cash flow, focusing on profitability, and avoiding the trap of burning excessive capital just to grow rapidly.

She believes that disciplined growth fundamentally requires prioritising a long-term vision over short-term gains. This sometimes involves making difficult choices, such as accepting a stock-out rather than compromising on product quality just to make a quick sale. 

Pallavi emphasises that cutting corners might yield immediate results, but it eventually leads to unhappy customers and damages the brand's ethical standing and trust.

Today, SuperBottoms operates at an Annual Recurring Revenue of around Rs 100 crore. Its best-selling products include the UNO reusable cloth diaper, padded underwear for potty training, dry feel langots, supersoft underwear, and period underwear for women.

The brand serves parents across major cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and several Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns through its online platforms.

Looking ahead, Pallavi has ambitious plans for the brand, aiming to scale it into a Rs 500 crore company within the next five years. 

To achieve this, she plans to slowly and steadily introduce new categories, such as kids' activewear and comfort wear, ensuring the brand grows without losing its core discipline.

80% Mother, 20% CEO on Sundays

Despite the demanding nature of scaling a Rs 100 crore business, Pallavi remains deeply committed to her role as a mother. 

Every day, she consciously decides how much of herself to give to her job and how much to her family

During the busy weekdays, Pallavi operates on an ‘80% CEO, 20% Mother’ ratio, dedicating the majority of her energy to SuperBottoms. 

However, when Sunday arrives, that dynamic completely flips. On weekends, she becomes ‘80% Mother and 20% CEO,’ intentionally letting the founder role shrink so she can prioritise her family.

Yet, as the leader of a growing startup, she acknowledges that a founder is never truly off the clock. She remains available to her team 24/7 if they need her. 

Instead of daily operations, Pallavi uses her 20% CEO time on Sundays for quiet, strategic thinking, focusing on the big-picture planning that the fast-paced weekdays rarely allow.

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