Last updated 15 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Market: New Zealand.

This is a story about an owner who knows every customer by name, and who's been quietly told that being personal is something only a big business with a big team can afford. It's the other way round. You can ring a customer who's about to run out. A big player running on scale usually can't. Here's what that looked like in a baby-supplies business, and what it means for yours.

New mums rarely run out of nappies on a convenient day. Kevin D'Ambros-Smith and his team ran online retail businesses for new parents, including Nappies Direct, and they noticed something simple: if you know roughly how many nappies a baby uses, you can work out when that mum will run low.

So they did. The business forecast when each mum was likely to run out and emailed her to say she was running low. If there was still no order, somebody picked up the phone.

The reaction became familiar. A mum would say: "You have ESP. I thought I was fine, and now I've only got 2 nappies."

There was no magic in it. There was a forecast, an email and a phone call, run across 45,000 customers on the database. What made it work wasn't the technology. It was the purpose behind it. The goal was always to help new mums and make their lives easier, not to push products. Many mums came to rely on the business to tell them what to buy, and when.

That's the part you can copy. Personal service doesn't scale by hiring a hundred people. It scales when you decide what "I noticed" looks like for your customer, and build a small system that does the noticing for you, so you can do the human bit.

Kevin's online retail businesses were small, and the big players priced hard against them. Suppliers told them privately that they couldn't look after a small retailer in the same way as the big ones. Competing on price was a game the size of your buying power decides. Competing on care wasn't.

A business running on scale tends to treat customers as segments. You can treat yours as people: a name, a rhythm, a moment when they need you. That's local knowledge, and it's hard to replicate at scale. The businesses were eventually sold in 2017 with Motherbase Media, after growing to millions of dollars in sales a year.

Kevin's team built this the hard way. You could build yours faster, because the tools you need are far more affordable than they used to be.

"Kevin got me to connect our ERP, email, website and Google Analytics to AI, and it has changed how we find and keep customers. AI now writes tailored prospecting emails every day and reaches out to lapsed customers with the products they bought before, and we're already getting positive replies. Our blogs, newsletters and SEO are all stronger too. Kevin doesn't just talk about AI, he helps you put it to work in your business."

Stephanie Lowe
Insinc Products Ltd

Results are specific to her business and are not typical.

This isn't for you if your customers buy once and never return, and you're happy with that. It's for the owner whose best customers come back, who knows they deserve better than a generic reminder, and who hasn't had the time to build a way of noticing. If that's you, it could be closer than you think.

Read next: No Discount Did That. A Handwritten Card Did. How a phone call and a card turned a struggling solo mum into a customer for life.

If you know your customers by name, your next step is to build the system that notices for you.