Softie Baby

Celebrating female-founded brands you'll want to know.

Since November 2025, we've been spotlighting the next generation of female-founded consumer brands and celebrating female entrepreneurship, showing that building a business is a real, viable career path for women from all walks of life, regardless of background, age, culture, or circumstance.

We started Mindful Brand to support women in succeeding in business - not just through what we do, but also in how we shop. We believe in a future where more seven-figure consumer brands are built by women, and we're committed to helping make that vision a reality.

Deciding which businesses to support is a personal choice.

If, like us, you prefer to champion female-owned brands, we hope you enjoy this series.

Today, we’re featuring Softie Baby, founded by Ciara Costello in 2026 in the UK.

About the Brand

Softie Baby is a premium, clean baby skincare brand. It brings adult skincare standards to the baby aisle, with formulas built to support the skin barrier daily from birth. Every product is fragrance-free, dermatologist-tested and paediatrician-approved, made in the UK, and formulated with ceramides and prebiotics as standard.

The brand is made for ingredient-conscious parents who want the same standards for their baby's skin as their own. Many find Softie Baby after struggling to find something natural, non-toxic and genuinely effective for sensitive skin.

Softie Baby was built by a mother determined to create cleaner, better products for her son's sensitive skin. Every formula rates 100/100 on Yuka and never contains fragrance, not even essential oils - ingredients the brand believes have no place in baby skincare. It's preventative rather than reactive, supporting healthy skin from day one.

Meet the Founder

Ciara is a first-time, solo founder who built Softie Baby from scratch after becoming a mum.

Before starting the brand, she spent over a decade in consumer goods and beauty, including as a Brand Director at P&G, Head of Marketing and eCommerce at Sarah Chapman, and Senior Consultant at McKinsey.

She built Softie Baby after seeing a real gap in the market for a baby skincare brand built for real parents.

How She Started

When Ciara's son was born, his skin was sensitive and easily irritated, and she couldn't find a baby skincare brand formulating to the standard she wanted.

She spoke to dermatologists and paediatric experts, and the advice was consistent: avoid fragrance and other potential irritants, and focus on ingredients that actively support the developing skin barrier.

No brand she could find was doing that consistently, so after over ten years working for some of the biggest names in beauty, she left to build one herself.

What She Learned

Ciara has learned to stick to what she believes in and not let anyone rush her when building the parts of a brand that really matter.

When she was formulating, it would have been faster and cheaper to cut corners on ingredients or testing, but she didn't want to bring a product to market that wasn't truly differentiated and to the standard she believed should exist.

It took double the amount of time she originally thought to bring the products to market, but she is glad she stuck to her guns and went through many iterations to create a product she truly believes in.

In summary - move fast on everything except the thing your brand is built on, like product quality.

Where to shop

Softie Baby is available to buy at softiebaby.com.

Instagram: @softiebabyskincare

TikTok: @softiebabyskincare

Support brands built by women. Don’t just say it. Shop it. Stock it. Fund it.