It was never one conversation. It was thousands.
Over thirty years of specialist obstetric practice — at Westmead Hospital, in private rooms at Bella Vista and Westmead, across countless consultations with women navigating every stage of pregnancy and postpartum recovery — the same questions kept arriving. About itchy, stretching belly skin. About stretch marks forming faster than expected. About hair falling out weeks after birth. And again and again, at six-week check-ups when new mothers would lift their shirts and quietly ask: ‘Is there anything I can do about my scar?’
I am a Maternal Fetal Medicine specialist. I hold a PhD from the University of Sydney, the CMFM subspecialty qualification, and thirty years of clinical experience. I have performed thousands of caesarean sections and managed some of the most complex pregnancies in New South Wales. I have been Head of the Maternal Fetal Medicine Unit at Westmead Hospital and I am an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney.
None of that prepared me for the gap I kept encountering: between what my patients needed, and what the market offered them.
The C-section scar was the clearest example. Keloid formation — where scar tissue grows beyond the original wound boundary — is a genuine concern for many patients, particularly those with certain skin tones that are well-represented in Australia’s multicultural population. My patients were asking for help. When I looked at what was available, I was disappointed. There was no well-designed approach. No product range that understood the particular challenges of the C-section scar — its location, its mechanical vulnerability, its emotional significance.
After many years of these conversations, I made a decision. If the right products did not exist, I would develop them.
I was joined in this by Katie Midson — my close friend and practice development manager, who had watched these conversations unfold across years of working alongside me in clinical practice. Katie understood what I knew clinically, but she also understood something I could only partly see from inside the consulting room: how much these concerns mattered to women, and how poorly the market was meeting them. Together, we founded Pregnancy and Baby Co.
Our first products were the most urgent. The C-Section Healing Kit — built around medical-grade silicone scar strips, now registered by the Therapeutic Goods Administration as a Medical Device Class 1 (ARTG 519747) — and the Kakadu Plum Belly Oil, formulated around the world’s richest natural source of Vitamin C, sourced from Australia’s Northern Territory and chosen for its clinical mechanism of collagen stimulation in stretching pregnancy skin.
These products were not developed by marketers. They were developed by a specialist obstetrician who had been wanting to develop them for thirty years.
Pregnancy and Baby Co. is still growing. Every new product in our range answers a question that has been raised in my consulting room. Every formulation is reviewed against the same clinical standards I apply to everything in my practice. And every product carries my name because I designed it, I believe in it, and I am willing to be held to it.
My patients trusted me with the most important health journey of their lives. This brand is how I continue to show up for them.
