From a single store in 1994 to 50 Me n Moms stores and availability across 20,000+ chemist & speciality baby stores, Mee Mee didn’t just grow alongside Indian parents, it changed what an entire generation could expect.
In 1994, if an Indian family wanted a well-made pram or a properly designed feeding bottle, the most reliable source wasn’t a shop. It was a suitcase. An uncle flying back from London, a cousin returning from Dubai — these were, for a generation of Indian parents, the unofficial supply chain for “good” baby products. The domestic market simply hadn’t caught up to what new parents actually needed, so families improvised.
That gap is where Naresh Khatar opened the first Me n Moms store. Not a brand yet, not a franchise model, not a catalogue spanning hundreds of products — just one store, built on a fairly simple bet: that Indian parents deserved the same quality of thinking that went into raising a child anywhere else in the world, without needing a relative’s suitcase to get it.
Three decades on, that single store has grown into more than a hundred outlets across the country, alongside Mee Mee, the product line that now sits in millions of Indian homes — in the cot in the nursery, the car seat in the back seat, the walker in the living room, the wipes in the diaper bag. Along the way, almost everything about the business has changed. The products have changed. The way parents shop has changed. The competitive set has changed beyond recognition. What hasn’t changed is harder to see at first, because it was never really about the products.
Most retail categories run on evaluation. A buyer compares features, checks reviews, weighs price against spec and moves on. Baby care looks like that from the outside — prams have wheel diameters, car seats have crash ratings, walkers have safety mechanisms. But the people buying these products are rarely in an evaluative state of mind. They’re sleep-deprived, a few days into a hospital stay, holding a baby for the first time and wondering if they’re already doing something wrong.
That’s the insight that has sat underneath every version of this business since the first store opened: a new parent isn’t shopping like a typical consumer. They’re shopping like someone looking for permission to trust their own instincts. The job was never just to build a better-engineered walker, one with a sensor that stops it at the edge of a step. It was to be the voice in the room that says, quietly, you’re going to be fine, and here’s something that will help. That single understanding is the thread running from a single store in 1994 to a 100+ stores today.
The India a new parent navigates today looks almost nothing like the India of 1994. Families have gotten smaller and more urban; a lot of new parents are raising a child in a city without grandparents living down the hall to field the 2 a.m. questions that used to get answered by household memory. In their place is a phone with a search bar, a mum’s WhatsApp group, an Instagram reel from someone who tried the same product six months ago. Today’s parent often arrives at a decision already half-informed, looking for something to confirm or correct what they’ve already read, rather than to be introduced to a category from zero.
The retail journey has shifted just as much. A specialty store with a warm welcome and personal attention used to be the entire experience. Now that same parent might discover a product through a marketplace listing, order it through a quick-commerce app that promises it before naptime ends and never see the inside of a physical store at all. Certification standards have gotten more rigorous, materials have gotten safer, design language has gotten cleaner — all real, necessary shifts. None of it changes what the parent on the other end is actually feeling in the moment they hit buy.
It shows up in the product range, too. A baby-care catalogue that once covered the basics now stretches across feeding, travel, nursery, bath time, safety gates, rockers and sterilisation — not because more categories make a bigger business, but because every one of those categories maps to a specific moment where a parent felt unsure and went looking for something to lean on. The range grew the way a parent’s worry list grows: one stage, one milestone, one sleepless night at a time.
That’s really what the next chapter of this business is about. Not chasing every new format simply because it’s new, but making sure that same reassurance shows up wherever a parent happens to be standing when they need it. A decade or two ago, that meant building out a hundred stores so a parent in a smaller city had the same access as one in Mumbai. Today, it means showing up correctly in a 10-minute delivery slot, in a comparison a parent is making between two listings at midnight, in a product description that quietly answers the question they were too anxious to type out loud. Tomorrow, it will mean something else again. Parenting itself keeps changing shape, with more dual-income households, more first-time parents raising children far from their hometowns and more of the research happening through a screen before a single rupee is spent.
The categories will keep multiplying. The channels will keep multiplying faster than anyone can fully plan for. But none of that changes the brief that’s been sitting underneath this business since one store opened its doors three decades ago: find the parent in the moment they feel least certain and be the thing that makes them feel a little more at peace.
A single store became more than a hundred because one thing never changed. Somewhere in India tonight, a new parent is awake at 2 a.m., wondering if they’re doing something wrong. In 1994, that same worry would have waited weeks for an answer to arrive home in a relative’s suitcase. Tonight, it doesn’t have to wait, because someone has been listening the whole time. That’s the part of this story that was never going to change.
