We Had a Sit Down with Bobbie's CEO

Find out what she said, what we're gonna do about it and watch a clip from our meeting. 👀

Nicole Longmire‘s baby lived for 36 days. She pumped every single day of his short life, even after it became clear that he would not be able to much of it.

Nicole could have shut off her whirring breast pump at any time and no one would have blamed her. She could have cited the immense pressure to breastfeed as an added layer of stress to nightmare she was living. She could have used her story of birth trauma as on opportunity to advance her career, the way many of her colleagues have done with Bobbie formula. And like her colleagues, she could have given thousands of mothers permission to quit breastfeeding.

Instead, last week, she looked Bobbie’s CEO, Laura Modi, directly in the eye and told her:

“You are out here recruiting us exploiting our profession—the only profession whose sole mission it is to support, promote, and protect breastfeeding. Bobbie using lactation professionals as marketing tools, is a practice that exploits vulnerable mothers and exploits a profession that exists to serve those mothers.”

I got chills. Then Nicole, without flinching, told this wrenching truth:

“When I see in your advertising that somehow breastfeeding or the act of lactating triggers poor mental health, I'm shook to my core. I think of the colossal depression that would have overtaken me had I not had the benefit of those breastfeeding hormones, had I not had that one thing that I could do for him. “

Shortly after Nicole’s story, 50 other women came on camera, some were nursing, some were crying, some were just stone-cold pissed. Then Morgan, a Rad Mom union member, started reading from our list of demands.

And there was Modi on my Zoom screen, brows arched, blushing, and tense.

QUEUE RECORD SCRATCH! How the hell did we get here???

When Natasha contacted me 2 years ago (!!) this fall to “start a mommy blog” I never thought I’d find myself face to face with the CEO of Bobbie formula, on a zoom with 50 other women who were ready to fight in the name of the motherbaby. I sat there in total awe watching for incredible Rad Mom Members — Jo, Lizzy, Nicole, and Morgan— tell a CEO who runs a powerful company, all the ways her company is doing direct damage to their communities and why they are committed to stopping it.

Nevertheless, this is the situation I found myself in last Wednesday. 

Can you believe this little blog we started two years ago to gossip about trad wives and review Paris Hilton’s reality show has turned into this??? I cannot.

A Little Context First:

After firing off a number of spicy, damning, furious posts on the way predatory formula marketing has flourished on social media and hijacked our maternal spaces, we realized that no one was coming to save us. The best and only force that could put an end to the exploitation of motherhood would be mothers.

We invited a couple of other boob and birth kooks we knew online and what started as group of 7 pissed off moms has turned into the #backoffbobbie movement. A movement, gentle reader, that you are a part of.

For the last two years, you were one of the hundreds of women have been organizing together across political affiliations, religions, dietary restrictions, and reality TV show preferences to fight for one thing: THE MOTHERBABY DYAD. 

In the past 2 years you have:

• Taken your boobs out not once but twice to demand a predatory formula company, Bobbie, to stop trashing breastfeeding in their marketing

• You crashed and disrupted countless “webinars that are actually just marketing in disguise” meetings to confront doctors, IBCLCs, doulas or other organizations would partner with this predatory company

• You mobbed the comments and forced multiple companies to take down their posts announcing partnerships with Bobbie

• You FREAKED OUT Bobbie’s investors by tagging them in your breastfeeding pics that they shut down their account

• You built relationships with women through your stories, meme trading, passionate lactivism and reverence for the sacred act of mothering

OH AND NOT TO MENTION

• Agitated and scared the CEO of Bobbie formula enough to get her to agree to meeting with 50 of us so we could share how the marketing she uses to make negatively impacts women

You did that. We did that.

Modi Cops to ‘Sleepless nights’ About Our #BackoffBobbie Campaign

Modi reached out a Rad Mom who she had a prior relationship with, a very cool Rad Mom, Carson Meyer. Carson helped arrange the sit down.

Modi showed up and stated that she was mainly there to listen but she did share a few things, 1) that our campaign is working 2) that we are misunderstanding Bobbie’s advertising or least the intention behind it. Here’s what she said in regards to our campaign:

“I've lost many kind of sleepless nights just thinking through it and had a lot of self -reflective moments looking at the content and questioning where we can do better and what improvements could be done and then also just feeling hurt by some of the things because I am also a mother that is feeding her baby in multiple ways and going through our own personal challenges.”

About Bobbie’s ads:

“[Sometimes] I see a post or I see an article or I see something getting taken out of context I will be honest, sometimes I cringe myself like ‘no that’s not the intention’ and you know, it's coming out the wrong way it's being perceived the wrong way.”

Later, Kate, a member of our Rad Mom research team reflected on this Modi’s comments on perception and intention of Bobbie’s and said this in response.

She kept saying that their marketing is being taken the wrong way or misinterpreted. That just doesn’t make sense. How else are you supposed to take “breastfeeding is bad for mental health” rather than at face value face? What’s the secret hidden positive meaning that’s supposedly eluding all of us??”

Alright, so it was our turn to talk. We had our powerful Rad Mom speakers. Here’s why each of them joined the #backoffbobbie campaign, in their own words.

Leaders of the Radical Moms Union confront Laura Modi

• Joanne Harper, mother of 2, doula: “I joined because the legacy of predatory formula marketing has impacted my family directly. Two generations of women in my family have not breastfed because they thought formula was better.”

• Lizzy Morris, a mother 3, birth advocate: “I have a rare medical condition that forces me to rely on formula to feed my babies. I choose an organic formula because clean ingredients are important to me. I am your target demographic but I find the misinformation in your ads disturbing and dangerous.”

• Nicole Longmire, mother of 2, IBCLC: “I dedicated my life to this sacred profession and I have taken an oath to protect breastfeeding.”

• Morgan S., mother of 2: “After having trouble breastfeeding my first born and my daughter and I went to an IBCLC who was uneducated in tongue ties and her only solution for us to use formula.”

Here’s a clip of Joanne powerfully confronting Modi about how Bobbie’s predatory marketing campaign is creating even more racial breastfeeding disparities. 

Vibe Shift: Rad Moms Give Our List of Demands to Bobbie

Modi is a professional, she was perfectly polite and appropriately empathetic when listening Rad Moms stories but there was SERIOUS vibe shift when Morgan, saddled up to the plate to bat clean up.

Morgan let Modi know that she and hundreds of other mothers were committed to continuing our #backoffbobbie campaign until the following conditions were met:

1. Laura Modi makes a public apology for disparaging breastfeeding in Bobbie’s marketing.
   

2. Cease all partnerships with birthworkers, lactation professionals and all IBCLCs
   

3. Set an example to other formula companies by inviting  your competitors to the table and starting a dialogue with stakeholders around responsible online formula marketing
   

4. All influencer formula marketing advertisements must disclose the risks of NEC.
   

5. And finally, you say you want to support breastfeeding moms. To prove it, we demand that you devote a portion of your marketing budget to advertising the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding

OOOOWEEEEE she did not like that— or seem to expect it! Not sure what she expected, tbh?? That we were going to be so moved by her willingness to meet with us that we’d be like, “You know what? You’re right. Feeding journeys are all different and it’s okay that your company profits off women the destruction of breastmilk and enriches your investors when babies don’t receive breastmilk. YAY BRAT SUMMER BESTIES!”

Nah, for one, we’re millennials and we don’t what is or isn’t ‘brat’ and more importantly, our union EMBRACES conflict, we don’t run from it.

Modi responded by saying she wasn’t going to debate us and that she worked for an organization that she needed to talk to before she responded to us. We told her we’d be happy to send our demands in writing, she didn’t take us up on the offer and signed off shortly after.

Modi Gave Us a Counter Offer. What Do You think About it?

A few days later, Modi reached out again with her counter-offer. And that’s where you come in. We are a collective and we make decisions together. We’re meeting to celebrate this campaign milestone and to review the counter offer, get in-put, debate, and make a decision. Be there or be un-rad forever.

We’re not done, seeing as how Bobbie, even through Laura Modi’s sympathetic head nods while listening to how her marketing destroys women, just released another huge partnership with an influencer with millions of followers and a billboard in Times Square.

kewl

This isn’t “normalizing” anything, this is targeted, effective marketing aimed at women who are struggling and vulnerable in order to line the pockets of hedge fund investors. 

Does that make you angry? It should. Join us!!! We’re not done! Comment below and let me know if you were at the meeting. How did you feel about what we’ve accomplished?