Brian Williams and Andrea Faulkner Williams started their business journey in their garage, with a single hero product and a willingness to look a little scrappy while they figured everything else out. Their premium baby and family skincare brand, Tubby Todd, now produces one of Amazon’s best-selling baby lotions and baby body washes, outranking alternatives from industry giants like Aveeno and Johnson’s. 

Their foray into entrepreneurship wasn’t entirely unexpected. The husband-wife duo shared a common dream of running their own business, a topic they discussed on one of their very first dates. “We talked about how it’d be really cool to run a business with your spouse one day,” Andrea, now the co-founder and president of Tubby Todd, tells Entrepreneur. 

Years later, that offhand dream became the foundation of Tubby Todd, a business they now run together. The idea for their first product came from a very personal need. After their first child was born, they decided to develop a gentle hair and body wash with clean ingredients that they could use at home. They tapped into Brian’s manufacturing contacts to get the product formulation process going.

However, during development, their second child arrived — and had very sensitive, eczema-prone skin. 

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“Then a new intention came into the product development,” Andrea says. “Not only did it need to be a great product that had a great user experience, but it also needed to have great ingredients and solve this problem that we had as a family with sensitive skin.”

That pivot reshaped the formula and honed the brand’s purpose to help families manage sensitive skin. 

Tubby Todd launched its first product, its baby hair and body wash, in 2014 after two years of formulation work. They had 750 bottles of product delivered straight to Brian and Andrea’s home garage. 

The early days were as lean as they come. “For the first six months, I shipped and did all of the marketing, basically everything else, while he [Brian] was working a full-time job to fund the business,” Andrea says.

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They weren’t in love with their branding or their website at first, but they embraced what Brian, the company’s CEO, calls the MVP mindset: “We just needed to launch with that minimum viable product that somebody could start using,” he says.

Calling the venture a side hustle is accurate, but doesn’t quite capture the stakes, with Brian instead characterizing it as a “massive gamble.”  

“This was a massive investment for us at the time as a percentage of our annual income,” Brian says. “There was no ‘let’s just try this out and take a little small risk.’”

At first, Brian and Andrea decided that Tubby Todd would be direct-to-consumer. They were wary of how hard it can be for small brands to land — and maintain — shelf space in places like Whole Foods or Target. So they initially focused on building a community, not chasing retailers. 

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Andrea says they took the first 750 bottles of product and sent them to anyone they knew who had any sort of social influence online. Their ask? Just try it. They couldn’t afford to pay influencers, but say the formula spoke for itself. 

“What we found was that this product made a big enough difference on them or their child’s skin that they wanted to share it with [their followers],” Andrea says.

That grassroots push created the Tubby Todd community, which Andrea says is still the brand’s “number one marketing tool.” Today, that community spans 600,000 Instagram followers, hundreds of thousands of SMS subscribers and over a million email subscribers.

Growing Tubby Todd has been an intentional process. Andrea and Brian expanded the product line over the years to include an ointment, hand sanitizer, sunscreen and other products. The two resisted Amazon for years, worried about how selling on the platform might change brand perception. However, last year they started selling on the site “because we know that’s where the moms are shopping,” Brian says. “We want to be where our customers are.”

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The bet paid off. Amazon has been “wildly successful,” Andrea says. She added that sales on its own site held steady while Amazon proved “very additive.” Tubby Todd isn’t just shifting customers from one platform to another. It is instead “growing the market” or expanding Amazon’s market size in its category. 

Within the first year, Tubby Todd’s cream became the number one best-selling baby lotion or cream on Amazon. The brand sells one All Over Ointment each minute in the U.S., with over one million ointments sold last year. 

That momentum gave Brian and Andrea the confidence to expand further into retail. As of last week, Tubby Todd marked its first major retail expansion with a push into 1,100 Target stores nationwide. Target is the brand’s first national brick-and-mortar retail partner. “All the early indicators are showing that we’re outpacing projections [at Target], which is really exciting,” Brian says. 

He explained that Tubby Todd’s sales have always been “very consistent.” Instead of big spikes and troughs, the brand has experienced steady growth of 30% to 50% year-over-year from the start. 

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A simple mission underlies the growth charts: connection. On a whiteboard in Brian and Andrea’s office, big red letters spell out the brand’s north star: “connecting families.” Part of the concept of Tubby Todd was the idea of bath time being an iPad-free zone where parents could connect with their children one-on-one.  

“We love that concept of how do we connect families, and how do we create content that’s special and unique?” Brian says. “That’s what keeps us going and gets us excited to come into the office every day.”

Brian’s advice for entrepreneurs is to just get started. “It’s never going to look perfect,” he says. “It’s always going to be a little bit challenging.”

Andrea added that entrepreneurs are people with passion and vision. They can accomplish more with the help of people around them. “No entrepreneur does anything alone,” she says. “Brian and I are a team. The quicker an entrepreneur can accept help and build with other people, the quicker they are going to find success.” 

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