By Sana Jafri, Founder of babygami
The story behind babygami, the collapsible baby bottle where one mom went looking for, couldn’t find, and spent ten years building.
Focus Tips
- The gap: the outdoor industry shrinks almost every kind of gear except the baby bottle parents actually carry.
- The big idea: having a baby doesn’t mean you have to pause the parts of your life that happen outside.
In 2016, I had an “Aha!”-moment. It was an idea for a collapsible baby bottle. And in 2026, it all became reality. This is the story of the ten years in between.
It all started with a camping trip, something I had always loved. But I was a first-time mom and I just wanted to enjoy the great outdoors. So, we, with a three-month-old, packed up and prepared for the trip and almost immediately, I ran into a problem nobody had warned me about.
Baby bottles aren’t built for the trail. They’re rigid and bulky. They take up space I did not have, and they wouldn’t collapse down when they were empty. I figured someone must have already solved this. But as I walked into REI or Recreational Equipment, Inc., a store that has figured out how to shrink almost every piece of outdoor gear down to nothing, I looked for a collapsible baby bottle.
There was not one.
I remember standing there thinking that could not be right. This is an industry that makes water filters the size of a straw and tents that fold into a stuff sack. But when it came to the gear a bottle-feeding parent actually needed outdoors, I realized there was a gap. The baby aisle was built for the kitchen counter. The outdoor aisle acted like parents did not exist.
The idea I couldn’t shake
I did not act on it right away. My hands were full. Raising my baby filled by schedule. But I couldn’t shake it off either. The thought came back every time I hauled a diaper bag that weighed more than my actual backpack.
Come two years later, I decided to actually build it. I called my friend Qudsia Khan, another mom like me who loved being outside with her kids, and together we set out to make the bottle that should have already existed.
Then life happened, the way it does. Two more kids, so I am now a mom of three boys. A full-time role running a nonprofit. COVID. I had plenty of starts and stops, and plenty of lessons in between. I had stretches when the idea sat on a shelf because I did not have room to build it. But I also had stretches when it was the thing keeping me going.
I want to be honest about that timeline, because a lot of founder stories skip the messy middle. Mine was mostly messy middle. The version where I have a great idea and launch it six months later is not the one that happened. Mine took a decade, and it took me becoming a different person than the one standing at that trailhead in 2016.
What I actually built
The product is simple, which is the point. babygami is a collapsible baby bottle made from food-grade silicone, free of BPA and phthalates. It holds a full eight ounces when you need it and collapses to about a third of its size when you do not. One base converts from bottle to sippy cup to snack cup, so it grows with your child instead of getting tossed at twelve months. And it has a clip built in, so you can hang it off a pack or a stroller instead of digging for it at the bottom of a bag.
We designed it the way the outdoor industry designs everything else, around weight, space, and how you actually move through a day. We just built it for the person nobody else was designing for: the mom holding the baby.
The part that surprised me
Somewhere along the way, the design stopped being only about the bottle’s functionality. What I keep hearing from other parents is relief. Relief that someone finally built for their real life instead of a nursery-shaped version of it.
It was not only parents. Outdoor gear reviewers picked babygami up as one of the products actually filling a gap in the market, rather than just another bottle on the shelf.
Sometimes you don’t know you need something until it is here. That turned out to be true for me too. I did not fully understand what I had been missing until I was holding the thing I kept wishing existed. babygami became a small permission slip, proof that having a baby did not mean packing away the version of me who loved being outside. I think a lot of new moms were quietly waiting for that permission. I was.
Bigger than a bottle
We built babygami in Chicago. I came to it as a Muslim mom in an outdoor world that has not always made room for people who look like me. And we built it with a lot of help, from the early Kickstarter backers who believed in a collapsible bottle before it existed, to a community that keeps showing up on trails and at our events.
If there is a lesson in any of this, it is one I wish someone had handed me at that trailhead. You do not have to wait until the kids are older to live the life you love. Start small and close to home if you have to. Just start.
I don’t think any of us get outside alone. We all have to work together to support getting people outside. That is my mission now, and it is bigger than the product: make it easier for families to keep living the lives they love after the baby comes.
In 2016, I had an idea. In 2026, it is in your hands. I truly hope you think it was worth the wait.