Simply Birth is an intimate business.
In February of 2006, I found out I was pregnant with our fourth baby. Having had three amazing waterbirth experiences in the UK, I immediately started to look at was available in Australia. I found children’s paddling pools, cumbersome wooden pools and spas – nothing like I had birthed in before.
My quest took me back to England (albeit an online journey) and I found La Bassine, a Made in Water product. I was extremely impressed with the design, the cost and the ethics of Made in Water. So I contacted the company.
Having no previous business experience, we took the plunge and committed to bringing La Bassine into Australia, making it available to every woman who wanted one. Over several pizzas and quite a few beers, the concept of Simply Birth was born.
Several months later, we found ourselves in business. As my belly grew, so did the international reputation of La Bassine, with enquires coming in from all over the southern hemisphere. Simply Birth started growing too.
Fast forward a couple of years, and we couldn’t believe our luck when we also secured sole distribution of The Birth Pool In A Box. For the first time ever, the southern hemisphere had a real choice of pools.
By then, we were selling our pools to individual women, midwives, doulas, birth centres and hospitals. We are so proud of the women in Australia, for helping to make change for many state policies regarding the use of water during labour and birth. We do believe the availability of our pools and their ease of use gave women the opportunity to really create some headway with these policies.
After 15 years of changing the face of Birth in both Australia and new Zealand and with the challenges of Covid, Supplies, and Shipping we made the decision to focusing on providing quality products only, we needed reliability for supply and quality, so we discontinued La Bassine products.
During Covid the amazing women of Australia and NZ made really autonomous decisions around their births and we sold unprecedented numbers of pools and liners, it was CRAZY! But thankfully our decision to focus on quality paid off and our supply was barely disrupted, we got close a couple of times but compared to the rest of the world, Birth Pool In A Box were fat more reliable in their supply than the supply toilet paper 😉
This year, as we head into 18 years of business, we are super excited to bring Oasis Birth Pools into Australia. Its a new product to us but has been sold in the USA since 2012, so market confidence is there. If we stock it, we stand by it, this has been our commitment since day 1 and hasn’t changed in all this time.
Thank you to all our customers, past and present. We couldn’t have made it this far without you.
With love,
Lisa and Pete
