Yi Jun Kwek | Little Blossom

1. What's your story?

Hello! I’m Yi Jun, the co-founder of Little Blossom. Little Blossom is an organic baby food brand which I co-founded with Gillian, who is my close friend and ex-colleague from Unilever. We both used to be Brand Managers for foods brands such as Knorr and Wall’s, but we have always secretly dreamed of starting our own business 🙂

After 5 years with Unilever, we decided to take the plunge. The idea for Little Blossom came about because we noticed that our family and friends who had just become new parents, were frustrated with their baby’s food options. Many of the existing options were surprisingly unhealthy (filled with sugar, salt and preservatives) and expensive. Majority of the brands were also imported from the West, and nothing was really made for parents in this region.

Little Blossom was thus created to provide parents with delicious, healthy and affordable food for their little ones!  We currently have a range of organic brown rice cereals and puffs, for little ones 6 months and above. Our products are all natural, contain no added sugar, salt or preservatives and halal certified. We are available on our online store and also stocked in over 200+ stores in leading retailers such as Fairprice, Cold Storage, Sheng Siong, Redmart and Mothercare.

Fun fact: Aside starting a business during the pandemic, I also got married during the pandemic in June 2020. My husband, Kai, is also an entrepreneur, who founded Rocket Academy, an online coding bootcamp that helps to train software engineers!

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2. What’s the most satisfying part about what you do?

I get the most satisfaction when I see kids enjoying Little Blossom, or hear from their parents about how much they love our products! Till date, we’ve received over 3000+ 5-Star reviews and I still read through every single one of them. It has been amazing to see our community grow over the past 3 years, with many of the kids growing up with Little Blossom’s products (my very own nieces and nephew included!). It definitely inspires me to keep going, knowing that we have a huge opportunity to continue growing with them.

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3. What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced and how did you move forward?

The biggest challenge was figuring out how to launch Little Blossom, as we watched the COVID19 pandemic unfold and escalate in early 2020.

We initially planned to launch Little Blossom at a Mum & Baby Fair, which prior to the pandemic would see crowds of over 100,000 parents over a single weekend. We thought it was the perfect opportunity for new parents to try and experience our products. Unfortunately, we had to pivot in March as events started to be canceled and Singapore entered its circuit breaker in April.

Everything had to go online - including our launch. We launched in May 2020 with our online website, and also sent gift sets of our products to friends, family and a small group of Mom influencers. Little did we know that it started becoming a trend to send “care-packages” to loved ones during the pandemic because people couldn’t meet physically.

Looking back, gifting was an opportunity that we discovered as a result of the pandemic and till this day remains a core feature of our online store. It also enabled us to gain positive word of mouth amongst the Mum community, which is critical with baby products. As a business born during the pandemic, it has taught us to be adaptable and resilient right from the get go, and has turned out to be a blessing in disguise for us!

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4. What's the best piece of business advice you would like to share?

Hire the best people, take care of them and they’ll take care of your business.

I’m proud of how far we’ve come together as a small team of 6 and look forward to what we can achieve together!

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5. How has working with Harvest Accounting and using Xero impacted your business / life?

Love working together with Harvest as our accounting partner for Little Blossom.

They have been instrumental in keeping our books and financials in place, while ensuring the process is highly efficient and effortless using tech-enabled solutions such as Xero, Futrli, and Dext.

They are also very responsive and always willing to go the extra mile to support us. I highly recommend Harvest as a trustworthy and reliable partner for other small business owners!

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6. Shameless plug for your business:

You can check us out at www.littleblossom.co or follow us on Instagram @little.blossomco.

Even if you’re not a parent, our products make great gifts and will help elevate your status to Favourite Uncle or Auntie 😄

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