Motherswork

Who owns Motherswork

Motherswork is owned by The Parent Inc, which acquired it in December 2023 after the retailer's 25th anniversary. Sharon Phoong-Wong, who founded it in 1998, remains Founder and CEO and sits on the group's leadership team. Motherswork had been bootstrapped for 25 years without outside funding and had turned down earlier buyers. Joining The Parent Inc gave it a route into the rest of Southeast Asia through the group's markets, teams and parent community.

The story

Sharon opened the first Motherswork in 1998 at Forum The Shopping Mall on Orchard Road, after a career in tax and treasury and three children's worth of shopping for things nobody in Singapore stocked. The store set the standard for premium baby retail here: brands chosen by someone who had used them, staff who had read the manual, and advice you could take home. Motherswork gave Hegen and Maison Q their first shelf, opened its first store in China in 2012, and ran for 25 years without a cent of outside money, turning down buyers along the way. Sharon's book, Wo(Mum): Living My Life as a Warrior, Woman and Mum, tells the story with fewer commas than this paragraph.

Where to find Motherswork

What it carries

More than 300 brands across strollers, car seats, nursery, feeding and skincare, including Stokke, Cybex, Joolz, UPPAbaby, Bugaboo, Philips Avent, Hegen, Ergobaby and the group's own Mama's Choice and Little Rei. Motherswork is also the group's distribution arm in several markets, holding exclusive distribution for around 20 brands.

What a store does that a website cannot

You cannot push a stroller up a ramp on a website. You cannot click a car seat into your own car, or ask a screen which bottle a baby who has refused four of them might accept. Parents do those things at Motherswork, with people who have done them a thousand times, and those conversations are the group's most honest data: what parents pick up, put down, compare and finally carry to the till. It feeds straight back into what we write, what we make and what we bring into the region next.