We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nathan Murdock. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nathan below.
Nathan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
We are a husband and wife team who discovered solace and strength in the bonds we formed with our first child during a challenging time.
The day after our first child was born, we were informed by the hospital billing department that our health insurance had been canceled weeks before without notice by Nathan’s employer at the time. The employer faced almost no consequences whatsoever and despite early promises to help they provided absolutely no assistance to us.
As a result, we found ourselves navigating the complexities of being new parents with an additional financial strain we didn’t plan for.
A few months passed and we decided to hire a team of lawyers who provided sound advice and even wrote warning letters to the leader of Nathan’s now-former employer, which were largely ignored.
However, at the same time, we found comfort and joy in the simple, everyday moments with our new baby.
Paula is originally from Brazil, and she and Nathan had also discussed the possibility of starting a business on the side, something they could work on together but which Paula could work on as she was now a full-time stay-at-home mom.
This experience inspired us to create Invuria, a brand dedicated to enhancing those precious moments between parents and their little ones.
Our first product is baby cologne, something not very commonly used by American parents, but is widely used by parents in Brazil. There are other baby cologne brands in the USA, but Nathan and Paula felt they could provide a new, high-quality, Brazilian-inspired but American-manufactured baby cologne using all-natural and organic ingredients for parents in the USA.
At Invuria, our mission is to provide high-quality, natural baby and toddler care products that nurture and strengthen the bonds between parents and their children. We are committed to delivering products that are safe, gentle, and high-quality ensuring that every moment with your baby is filled with love, trust, and joy in every moment.
Nathan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
As previously mentioned, we decided on baby cologne as this is a common product used by Brazilian parents with children five and younger. We felt we could create a new brand that featured a high-quality product combining inspiration from Paula’s Brazilian side with American manufacturing quality.
Baby cologne is very useful for providing an extra touch of love and care for your baby so they can smell fresh and clean. After one begins using it, it starts to feel natural to apply a few spritzes of cologne onto a baby after bathing them, changing their diaper, or getting them ready for bed.
Our cologne is manufactured locally in Utah, we worked with them to develop the scent completely from scratch. After testing hundreds of different scents and scent combinations, our manufacturer did their magic to create our new cologne.
The first baby cologne we’ve named ”Afeto” which means, “affection” in Brazilian Portuguese. We chose this name to represent feelings of closeness between parents & their little ones and highlight our Brazilian-American origins. It features all-natural and organic ingredients, no alcohol, is safe to use on a baby’s skin, and the scent is delightful if we do say so ourselves.
In addition, every bottle of Afeto comes in a glass bottle with a bamboo lid thus reducing our plastic usage greatly compared to competitors. What’s more every bottle fits into a custom-designed cardboard cylinder box making it safe for home or travel.
We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.
We have a goal to post at least weekly on our Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook pages. The content itself we try to keep varied, therefore we have a mixture of parenting advice from a multicultural household perspective, behind-the-scenes updates about the business, user-generated content, customer reviews, and more.
In addition we send out a weekly newsletter and offer users who purchase to leave a review on the site with a discount code for their next purchase.
We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.
Our main website is hosted on Shopify, a platform Nathan has had some previous experience using in his day job. It’s a great choice for a startup business as it is very versatile with many app plugin options.
We also have an Etsy shop, too.
Our next step will be to get launched on Amazon, which we are planning to do once we have our brand registry completed with the US Patent Office, which is in its final stages. We want to launch on Amazon simply for the sheer amount of traffic that is available on the platform. There will be more and bigger competitors waiting but based on our reviews and feedback we are confident that our product will stand out positively amongst our competition.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://invuria.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/invuria_baby
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Invuria
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Invuria
- Other: https://tiktok.com/invuriababy
Image Credits
Ali Eden
Shalaya Dobson