Trouble getting their first-born daughter to sleep led a Queenstown couple into a business that has directly helped more than 100,000 babies and toddlers — and their parents — get a good night’s kip.
Couple Emma and Brandon Purdue launched Baby Sleep Consultant 11 years ago, five years after the seed was sown when baby Elsbeth, now 16, had trouble sleeping.
‘‘And, like all new parents, I didn’t know what I was doing,’’ Emma says.
A science and biology high school teacher in Whanganui at the time, she decided to use her scientific expertise to tackle the problem.
‘‘I just started researching the hell out of infant sleep, pretty much.’’
After testing her theories on her own children, and friends’ babies, Emma qualified as a baby sleep consultant.
Based in Auckland and while on maternity leave with her third child, Carter, born in May, 2012, Emma decided she didn’t want to go back to full-time teaching.
Soon after Carter’s birth she launched her business, and by that Christmas ‘‘we had to hire staff’’.
Starting at $30 for a consultation, it didn’t take long to saturate the market — today, the business has 30 sleep consultants across New Zealand and Australia, who visit people in their homes, or offer virtual consultations.
In 2014, the Purdues set themselves up as a registered training provider and added another arm to the business, Baby Sleep Consultants Training, delivered via an online programme that has, to date, trained and registered 1000 consultants across 65 countries.
Six and a-half years ago, Brandon, an ultrarunner in his spare time, quit his job with the NZ Air Force to join the business full-time, and the family moved to Lower Shotover.
Baby Sleep Consultant consultations take a 360-degree approach to help parents get to the root cause of the problem, and give them tools to make ongoing improvements.
‘‘[Children are] screaming for a reason … we take a very holistic view of everything that’s happening with that child and getting to the crux of the ‘why’, helps us build a solution … rather than some thing cookie-cutter,’’ Emma says.
