Jennifer Hyman Will Become Babylist CEO as Founder Natalie Gordon Moves to Executive Chair

Babylist is preparing for a founder-to-operator handover, naming Jennifer Hyman as its next chief executive while founder Natalie Gordon moves into the executive chair role. In a 29 July announcement, the Oakland company said Hyman, co-founder and former chief executive of Rent the Runway and a current Babylist board member, will take over as CEO on 9 September 2026. Gordon founded Babylist in 2011 and has led it for 15 years, turning a universal baby registry into a broader platform for growing families.

The move is a leadership story with two founder angles. Gordon is not exiting the company she built. She is shifting into a board-level role after a long founder CEO run, a moment many scaling companies eventually face. Hyman, meanwhile, arrives with her own founder record. Babylist said she co-founded Rent the Runway in 2009, led the company for nearly two decades and took it public in 2021, making her one of the comparatively small group of women who have founded a company and led it through an IPO.

Babylist is also handing Hyman a business with real scale. The company said it surpassed 750 million dollars in annual revenue in 2025, recorded 45 percent year-over-year growth and reached an eighth consecutive year of profitability. It said it is tracking toward 1 billion dollars in revenue in 2026, employs about 800 people across the United States and helped more than 10 million people make purchases in 2025. Those company-reported figures put the leadership change in a different category from a routine executive appointment.

The strategic question is what Babylist becomes next. The company began as a registry, but the announcement frames it as a full parenting platform spanning commerce, health, money, showrooms, content and community. Babylist Health launched in 2022 and is approaching 100 million dollars in revenue, according to the company. In July 2026, Babylist launched Early Investor, a platform for educational gifting. Showrooms in Los Angeles and New York add an in-person discovery layer to a business that started online.

For SheMeansNews readers, this matters because maternity, parenting and family spending are still often treated as lifestyle categories rather than major economic markets. Babylist says the U.S. baby and kids market is worth an estimated 235 billion dollars annually. It also says families spend an average of 28,000 dollars in a baby's first year and that more than 80 percent of category spending is essential. A woman-founded company sitting in the middle of those decisions can influence not only what families buy, but how they access benefits, savings tools, product guidance and health support.

The transition also shows how founder-led companies can preserve continuity without freezing leadership in place. Gordon built the trust, brand and operating base. Hyman is being asked to accelerate and broaden the platform. The risk is that expanding into health, finance and community can dilute the simplicity that made Babylist useful in the first place. The opportunity is that the company already has customer trust at a moment when new parents are making many decisions at once. If the handover works, Babylist becomes a case study in how a woman founder can step up to governance while another woman founder takes the business into its next stage.