From BABYink to Flexisuit, Kollektive takes baby and toddler retail products to the changing table

The demands of parenthood led Melinda Farley to sell her first business BABYink, a unique product using advanced fingerprinting technology to make a keepsake for parents of their little ones' hands and feet.

But a few years later the opportunity emerged to buy it back with her husband Robert, setting the scene for a fast-growing house of brands - some developed in-house and others curated from partners - that now serves 2,000 points of sale across Australia and New Zealand. 

The Kollektive founder tells Business News Australia how even as the group has struck deals with the country's largest stores, the implications for its loyal independent retail base are a driving force of decision making with new releases.

Inspired by her close friends at textile recycling company UPPAREL, the founders are also on the cusp of launching a new baby bodysuit that will be more enduring as the infant grows, leading to less waste.

"Relentless curiosity" is the trait that Farley believes underpins much of her entrepreneurial success - "a bit of a dog at a bone" chasing the next big problem to solve. From a professional background as a travel agent with no founder experience, her first literal footprint in the world of retail entrepreneurship came with the birth of her first son in 2009.

Only 23 years' old at the time, she wanted to find a way to capture 'how tiny and gorgeous his little feet were' but was not enamoured by existing options on the market - either a clay or plaster cast sculpture, or a messy painting option.

Farley then nonchalantly describes the logical thing that she - but not most people - would do in such a situation. She got in contact with a US manufacturer that was providing inkless fingerprinting technology for the FBI, involving a small towelette wipe that can be pressed onto a special coated paper to reveal 'FBI-type detail'.

"That system was becoming redundant for fingerprinting but of course it made for a great story as it was inkless, so safe and non-toxic but also relatively mess-free - more so than anything else for taking a little hand and footprint," Farley explains.

"It’s about the easiest and mess-free system you can come up with, so we worked with the manufacturer to go from it being a dark, silvery grey sort of colour to options of blue, pink and silvery colours, and bring that to the market for a no-brainer $20 RRP keepsake or gift.

"So I cut my teeth in retail pretty early."

She says the first believer in BABYink as a buyer was the now-defunct - at least from a physical retail perspective - Babies 'R' Us, an offshoot of the Toys 'R' Us which much later would go into administration twice and is now a purely e-commerce brand owned by distributor Directed Electronics.

"We don't really have a baby-specific trade show in Australia but at the time the industry was trialling one of those. So there wasn't a lot of traffic, but I was just lucky enough to come across the buyer for Babies 'R' Us," Farley says.

"You can imagine my excitement – she was wrapped, thought it was fantastic, wanted to put it in store. I got myself down to store and bought the first one and kept the receipt.

"That was really its first start. It’s like everything – once you can give it some credibility, you then get the opportunity to open more doors."

Fast forward to 2013 and the brand was doing well, but the founder faced the classic juggling act of finding enough time to be the best leader possible while also spending enough time with her two kids at that point.

"I think unfortunately mums who are actively working with kids and in the business will often say there’s a tough choice to make between the business awkwardly getting too big for you," Farley says.

"I had the opportunity for a trade sale. It was probably a little bit personal - I'm glad I did, because it gave me the break, a lot of perspective and a lot of opportunity to think about it."

One of the questions she asked herself was that if she had her time again, would she start the business again? The answer was yes, and then fate intervened.

"I asked what would I do if it landed in my lap, and quite amazingly I think it was meant to be mine and came back to me, so I took that opportunity."

A second run

After she bought back BABYink in 2017 alongside her husband Rob Farley, they made the brand part of a new business called Kollektive, inspired by collectives of brands and smaller, independent stores that are always on the hunt for special items to stock.

"I think the baby and kids sector of retail is a really lovely place, and if you know it well and you kind of get it, then you’re really playing with emotional buying," she says.

"I knew the opportunity still existed, where, if we had a buyer for Baby Ink – be it mum-and-dad consumer buyers right through to the head buyer of Babies ‘R’ Us - then the chances of of them being interested in a suite of other things that I had to offer that weren’t competitive but complementary to BABYink were high.

"In my travels with BABYink, I'd noticed this growing sector of retail that was a bit unloved."

Farley says that when you're developing retail-facing products you'll generally 'shoot for the stars' with the biggest players, but there was another retail segment that could do with more attention.

"I really felt that somewhere in the middle that small, independent mum-and-dad type store was a bit unloved, and fell in the middle," she says.

"I always had this vision about loving them the same way that we would love a D2C customer, with all those D2C principles – fast delivery, flat rate shipping, surprise and delight, and easy ordering systems.

"We offer low barriers to sale by going against industry norms in offering very low minimum order requirements, supporting them when cash flow is a struggle or they want to try something new but are nervous to overcommit.

The importance of saying 'no', and strengthening the business for more home-grown brands

Today the company works with a large chunk of the biggest names in Australian retail within the category, which combined represent around 30 per cent of Kollektive's sales.

"It’s great that we trade with the big guys now, but we don't forget our origins," says Farley, who won the 2025 Melbourne Young Entrepreneur Award - Manufacturing & Supply Chain.

"Today we still make decisions really carefully based on how it’s going to impact our thousand-strong independent retailers."

She says Kollektive has become a major supplier of in-demand baby and children's products in Australia and New Zealand, both as an exclusive distributor for well-known international brands like BIBS, Moonie, Oil&Carol and Trixie, as well as manufacturing its owned brands that were either developed or acquired.

"Some of our bigger brands are now starting to take proper market share and are challenging big companies," she says.

"BIBS, which is in pacifiers and bottles, would be a significant challenger. It's really come in to that segment with a new lens and it’s really resonating. . It’s a Danish company, and I think Australians and New Zealanders have this really strong affinity for European led baby products...that's why we buy particular brands generally speaking of that European quality and style.

"Over the years we've built up such a strong reputation with our partners overseas that they love our management of them in Australia and New Zealand, and they are knocking on the door now, whereas I used to beat down the door myself and try and win contracts out of thin air."

She says the company now is in a position where, as it's being approached all the time, Farley has learned the power of saying 'no'.

"There’s definitely a little bit more power in what you say ‘no’ to, and you can’t say ‘yes’ to everything. That, as an entrepreneur, has taken me a long time to learn," Farley notes.

"We're in a prime position now where the team is so strong with the experience within us all, and our drive is so great. We have house-led owned brands obviously like BABYink, and we acquired a company called Kippins which is a really strong comforter Australiana-themed brand, all organic.

"We're in a position to buy and scale other Australian brands, and we’re in a position to start our own."

This is where Kollektive's next big project comes into play - Flexisuit, born partly through Farley's observations of her friends Michael and Tina Elias of UPPAREL and their passion for reducing textile waste.

"I'm so proud of what they're up to and I love that space. We work with a lot of Europeans that tend to be ahead of the curve and we see innovation around responsibility and recycling, responsible manufacturing and so on. Being the entrepreneurial way that I am, I wanted to somehow connect that with baby and kids products," she says.

Following this train of thought she made contact with an Italian manufacturer that she'd worked with previously, and the two companies worked together to develop Flexisuit.

"In an Australian first, this patented baby bodysuit gently expands as baby grows. It will replace six sizes of existing bodysuits from '0000' to 2 years, covering newborns to two-year-olds, saving parents money, and importantly tackling waste.

"As you can appreciate; textile waste in the baby industry is extremely high. This unique product will be one of the first to tackle this problem head on and speak to a new generation of environmentally conscious parents. Put simply, this will be a very big deal in our industry.

"Australia and New Zealand are good test beds for big international companies, and this is another good example of a test bed for us to make sure we get this right, and then send this out to the big guys into the United States and Europe."

A large part of the global launch will be tied to a planned showcase of the Flexisuit next year at a leading global trade fair in Germany, Kind und Jugend.

"Over the years, I have built a strong network of world class international distributors from all corners of the globe so our path to International markets is strong," the founder adds.