Baby Isn’t the Only Customer

By Tam Goldsmith

The Bunny Hive designs for children and their parents, giving both a reason to keep coming back.

The Bunny Hive was created by two mothers who thought children's activities had forgotten about the adult in the room. Their growing US franchise is testing whether making parents want to stay can be good business too.

Parents spend an extraordinary amount of money taking their children to places they would never choose to visit without them. They sit beside swimming pools, in dance-school corridors, on plastic chairs and around soft-play centres because their child is enjoying themselves. The child gets the activity; the adult often gets somewhere to wait.

Brittany Schmid and Katy Doar knew this world because they were living it. The best friends became mothers while living in different cities, Schmid in Atlanta and Doar in New York, and both found early motherhood more isolating than they had expected. There were plenty of activities available for babies, but far fewer places that appeared to have given much thought to whether the mother might want to be there too.

Their response became The Bunny Hive. The first studio opened in the Atlanta area in 2019, offering music, art, sensory play, movement and other classes for babies and young children. The business now describes itself as a social club for little ones and their grown-ups and has expanded through franchising across the United States.

That description tells us quite a lot about the business. The Bunny Hive isn't simply selling something for children and providing somewhere for the adults to wait. It is trying to make both of them want to come through the door, which changes the economics of a children's activity business more than you might expect.

Children's businesses have got away with ignoring parents for years

There is a strange assumption in businesses aimed at children that if the child enjoys themselves, the adult experience barely matters. Parents routinely tolerate awkward booking systems, nowhere comfortable to sit, inconvenient class times and fairly grim surroundings because swimming, dancing or messy play is supposedly for the child.

The Bunny Hive has approached the experience differently. Its studios are deliberately calm and comfortable, while the programme includes opportunities for adults to meet alongside children's classes. Memberships, social events and private gatherings give families several reasons to use the same location rather than simply arriving for a class and leaving immediately afterwards.

Commercially, this makes sense because a nine-month-old isn't comparing local enrichment providers. The parent finds the business, books the class, pays the membership, gets everybody there and decides whether the experience deserves another place in an already crowded family diary.

A child enjoying the class clearly matters. A parent enjoying the visit matters too, particularly when the business depends on that person choosing to return several times a month.

The business opportunity in giving parents somewhere to go

There is a serious issue sitting underneath the attractive studios. Early parenthood can be extremely isolating, particularly when somebody's working life and social routine change almost overnight.

The Bunny Hive did not invent that problem and a children's franchise isn't going to solve parental loneliness. What Schmid and Doar recognised was something much more practical: people with babies need places they can comfortably go during the day, and many of them would quite like some adult company when they get there.

That can change the relationship between a family and the business. Instead of purchasing 30 minutes of music or sensory play, a parent can begin to regard the studio as part of their weekly routine. They know the people working there, recognise other parents and have several reasons to return.

For a membership business, those relationships have commercial value. Someone who attends regularly, joins an event and eventually books a birthday party is a more valuable customer than someone who purchases a single class. A parent who has also made friends at the studio has another reason to renew rather than trying the children's activity down the road.

The Bunny Hive has therefore put something unusually difficult into its franchise proposition. Part of the value of the business depends on people forming relationships with one another.

You can franchise the studio. Friendship is harder

A franchisor can specify furniture, colours, curriculum, booking software and how a class should be delivered. It can provide marketing materials, train staff and make sure every location looks recognisably like The Bunny Hive. Creating a room in which strangers actually begin talking to one another is much harder to put into an operations manual.

That puts unusual pressure on the local franchisee and studio team. Someone needs to remember names, introduce people naturally and notice when a new parent is standing alone. They need to make the place welcoming on the mornings when somebody arrives late with a tired baby and has neither the time nor the inclination for forced socialising.

The company's approach to franchise recruitment suggests it understands this. The Bunny Hive says it is looking for a primary owner-operator rather than a passive investor and expects the owner to spend an initial period working as the full-time Studio Director, with a regular presence in the business.

For a concept built around local relationships, that requirement makes sense. An absentee owner can monitor revenue and membership numbers from a spreadsheet, but those figures will not tell them whether Wednesday morning has become a place local parents genuinely look forward to attending.

The beautiful studio could hide a difficult business

The Bunny Hive is an extremely attractive franchise. Its studios are stylish, the branding is polished and the concept photographs beautifully, which is an obvious advantage when much of the target market discovers places through social media.

It could also make the opportunity look deceptively simple.

The current franchise proposition lists a $42,000 initial franchise fee and a 7% royalty. Depending on the studio and development arrangement, the total investment can run well into six figures. Once open, the franchisee still has rent, staff, marketing and the ordinary costs of operating a physical location.

Those costs have to be paid by enough families using the studio often enough to produce a worthwhile return. The community may help customers stay, but a pleasant atmosphere does not compensate for poor occupancy, weak membership retention or an expensive lease.

There is also a problem every children's business eventually encounters: its customers grow up. The Bunny Hive serves families from the newborn stage through kindergarten, so even its happiest customers eventually leave the core market.

That makes local reputation particularly important. Each franchisee needs a steady supply of new parents discovering the business while keeping existing families for as much of their relatively short customer life as possible. In that environment, recommendations between parents can be worth considerably more than an attractive Instagram feed.

Perhaps the child was never the only customer

The Bunny Hive's approach raises a useful question for the wider children's franchise sector. Businesses spend enormous amounts of time thinking about what the child experiences and can be surprisingly casual about the person controlling the diary and bank account.

A swimming franchise can employ excellent instructors while having dreadful changing rooms. A tutoring business can produce good educational results while making scheduling unnecessarily painful. A children's entertainment venue can delight a six-year-old while leaving the adult desperate to get out.

Parents put up with a remarkable amount when their children are happy, but tolerance is not the same thing as loyalty.

The Bunny Hive has taken the opposite approach by putting the grown-up into the proposition itself. Parents are not supposed to endure the experience while their child benefits from it; they are meant to get something from being there as well.

That may prove commercially powerful, but it also makes the franchise harder to reproduce. A poor class can be retrained and a broken booking process can be fixed. A studio where parents simply don't connect with one another could look perfect, follow every operating procedure and still miss an important part of why the concept exists.

The real test for The Bunny Hive will therefore be whether independent franchisees can reproduce something that originally grew from two friends' experience of motherhood. If they can, the company may have found an idea that reaches well beyond children's enrichment: sometimes the customer businesses overlook is the person who has been sitting in the room all along.

What We Can Learn From This

Franchisors serving children should examine their businesses from the parent's side of the transaction, including booking, parking, waiting, communication and whether the adult actually enjoys being there. The Bunny Hive has gone further by making adult connection part of what families are buying, which could improve retention and referrals but makes the quality of the local franchisee especially important. Prospective operators should look beyond the attractive studios and examine membership retention, customer acquisition, occupancy costs and how quickly families age out of the service. If parents are choosing the business partly because they want to be there themselves, The Bunny Hive has found something many children's businesses have overlooked.