Chinese Women are Flocking to Postpartum Centers after Giving Birth

Postpartum centers, facilities specially designed to give professional care to postpartum women and their new-born babies, first started cropping up in the 1990s in Beijing. While before it was a luxury just for the wealthy, nowadays, as people’s economic conditions improve, this service has become highly welcomed among new mothers, especially after the announcement of the two-child policy.

What is a postpartum center? 

In China, there is a traditional practice of postpartum confinement, or zuoyuezi (literally “sitting the month”), where new mothers stay indoors for a month and eat specific foods and follow certain practices meant to restore their energy and health. 

In the past, it was common for the woman’s mother or mother-in-law to come stay with her for the month and take care of her and the baby, but in modern society the family may be living apart or the grandparents may not be able to take off of work and come stay the entire time. 

This is why postpartum centers started cropping up. These centers are like a mix between a hospital and a cushy hotel. Depending on the center, they offer a wide range of services such as teaching the mother how to breastfeed, how to wash and diaper the baby, etc. They also provide food specifically designed for postpartum mothers. 

A Rapidly Growing Industry

According to a report on postpartum centers (2016-2022年中国月子中心行业研究与投资前景分析报告), the scale of China’s postpartum center market in 2010 was 1.02 billion RMB, while in 2014, the number reached 4.2 billion and in 2019, the market was valued at 15 billion RMB. The number of postpartum centers in China is growing rapidly. In 2013, there were 550 centers and in 2018, it grew to 4,050 centers. 

And there is a lot of room for growth. Compared with other areas in Asia, such as South Korea and Taiwan, where the penetrance rate is 60% and 70% respectively, the penetration rate in China is only at 5%. 

Leading Brand

Among those postpartum centers, one of the top runners is Saint Bella (圣贝拉). It has become many celebrities’ go-to place after giving birth. The brand was founded in 2017. For the past three years, its satisfaction rate is 99.1% and it often ranks TOP 1 on many lifestyle platforms or mommy-baby apps. 

The average amount per order at Saint Bella is 160k RMB ($24.7K) (note: the average amount in the confinement industry is around 40k to 100k RMB), and over 80% of families choose to have other services provided by Saint Bella other than taking care of the mommy and baby, such as postpartum recovery and asking nurses to provide postpartum-related service at home. These extra services cost around 30k RMB for a household.

Postpartum service usually costs a lot and people don’t need it most of the time. When choosing brands or postpartum centers, people tend to go for those top runners, and that kind of explains why Saint Bella is able to maintain such a high price.

Why is Saint Bella able to achieve such success?

Promotion 

By providing high-quality and thoughtful service, Saint Bella has become many celebrities’ choice for a postpartum center. These celebrities’ lives while staying at Saint Bella shows up on Weibo’s hot topic ranking board sometimes. This helps the brand get lots of attention.

The brand also has large-scale offline activities every year. In 2020, it created an exhibition called “Me Before U”, which showed the journey from being pregnant to giving birth to a baby. The exhibition was held at three cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu (成都). The brand invited many celebrities and KOLs to attend the show. 

To reach its target audience of high net-worth individuals, Saint Bella partners with high-end jewellery brands such as Mikimoto, Chaumet, and Cartier to sponsor and promote the event, and it often holds the event at luxury hotels such as the Peninsula Hotel, Rosewood, Park Hyatt and the Waldorf Astoria. The customers that Saint Bella targets match with these jewelry brands’ and hotels’ consumers. It helps to improve Saint Bella’s image as well. 

Authority

In 2018, just a year after the brand was founded, Saint Bella was invited by the government to take part in establishing regulations for the mommy-baby industry. This made consumers regard Saint Bella as an authority and because of its role, the brand is able to learn the most updated regulations in the industry.

Establish training colleges 

Saint Bella works with ACI (American Certification Institute) to obtain the training courses for those carers, and it also works with high-profile hotels in China to provide professional training for its employees. It is the only confinement center in the mainland of China that has a complete training system. 

Postpartum centers are just a starting point 

Saint Bella belongs to PrimeCare International (贝康集团), which is a nursing care institute. PrimeCare’s management team is highly-educated and most of them were senior executives at major companies such as Alibaba, ByteDance, Didi, and Ogilvy. Such a management team is very rare in the postpartum industry. The team brings a fresh perspective and business know-how to the healthcare industry.

PrimeCare chose postpartum centers as a starting point and they plan to expand their business to other niches such as baby education and elderly care.

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