Stop building breast pumps to impress investors. Start building them to impress women

The wearable breast pump space has never been more crowded. In the last three years alone, dozens of new devices have hit the market, each one positioned as more feature-packed than the last. Night lights. Stronger and stronger suction. Electric charging cases. Massagers and heat, placed with all the anatomical confidence of someone who has never needed to use one during late-night feeding hours, no less examined a woman’s anatomy or the clinical research on breast milk production.

Feature innovation is important for a pitch deck you’re putting in front of investors. But from the inside of a nursing room – whether that’s at home, at the park, or in your employer’s pumping room – it too often looks like engineers trying to out-compete each other, rather than solving problems focused on women’s needs.

I know this category from both sides. I came to this industry not as an executive with a market map, but as a mother who deeply understood the problem that existing products weren’t solving. That empathy taught me something that I don’t think gets said often enough in consumer tech: there is a meaningful difference between studying your user and being your user. The best products come from people who don’t have to imagine the problem because they’ve actually lived it.

Empathy is an important part of innovating solutions, but it’s not enough, and this is also where many well-intentioned products fall short. Mothers don’t just deserve technology that centers their experience. They deserve technology that works, that has been tested, validated, and held to the same rigorous clinical standards we expect of any medical device that interacts with the human body.

A flood of hardware

Innovation in our category is genuinely important. Women deserve better products to support breastfeeding, and advocacy that moves the world forward in support of postpartum well-being. The market for products that support nursing mothers is growing, and that growth means more companies will enter it, some with real intent to innovate and others chasing revenue opportunities.

In our category today, consumers are facing a flood of hardware that’s optimized to look good on a competitive spec sheet, not designed for their actual lives or biology. This is placing women into the “gadget trap”: a product team identifies a growing market, conducts a customer survey, and might even run a focus group or two before handing the design brief off to engineers to make the products impressive enough to win a slide in the investor deck. That device may look good on paper, but underperform — or even lead to discomfort or unsafe outcomes for those who are actually using it. For example, many wearable pumps strive to be the “thinnest” and, in doing so, build a pump that does not accommodate most women’s nipple enlargement while pumping — and worse, pair that with extremely strong suction. The result is a product that hurts and is ineffective.

Not a niche

Part of what drives this category’s blind spot is a persistent underestimation of who mothers are as consumers. They’re not a niche; they are some of the most discerning, demanding, and overlooked in consumer technology. They’re constantly navigating under limited time, limited sleep, limited physical and emotional bandwidth, and as industry innovators, we should have zero tolerance for products that waste any of those resources.

Companies that center women and treat them with care and respect ultimately build better products. Brands that get this wrong are simply solving for the wrong audience. They were built for the marketing pitch and not for the person. To design with purpose, rather than to design for a pitch deck, isn’t about asking the question “What can we add?” It’s about asking “What can we make better? What can we simplify? What really works?”

Listen rather than pitch

These questions sound deceptively simple. Answering them is one of the hardest disciplines in product design, because they require resisting the instinct to keep building in “more.” Elegant, effective designs are built not through research alone. Research tells you what people say. Lived experience tells you what people mean. The best teams find ways to bridge that gap, through deep listening, through clinical partnership, through co-development with the people who will actually use what you’re building.

The brands that will win in this category long-term are not just the ones with the most features. They’re the ones willing to go deeper and let the people who actually use the product lead the way. This is especially true in women’s health.

For too long, women have been using products that weren’t really built for them — that was the problem with the breast pump category in the first place, before Willow began the wearable revolution. Let’s not let the mission at the core of this category be outpaced by market pressure to outcompete on the spec sheet. That discipline, the willingness to focus rather than add, to listen rather than pitch, is what separates a product built for a mother from a product built for a digital ad.

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