Shazi Visram, Healthynest

Entrepreneur’s passion for healthy baby products comes from a personal place

 

The healthy baby product industry has grown exponentially in the last few decades, and Shazi Visram has been a key player in that surge. From founding an organic baby food company just out of graduate school through raising an autistic son and then launching her baby-product company, Healthynest, during the pandemic, Shazi has immersed herself in the mission of protecting children’s environments. She sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about motherhood, her journey creating two successful mission-driven companies, and her roles as an investor and advisor.

A passion for entrepreneurship—and safe and organic children’s products

Shazi describes her journey as an entrepreneur as anything but pre-ordained. As the daughter of immigrants who ran their own businesses, she observed her parents’ entrepreneurial struggles and realized she wanted nothing to do with that—she’d be an artist and paint pictures instead. But by her early 20s, she realized that working for yourself is empowering. “When you work for yourself, the values that you bring into your work are your very own and you're directing the ethics of your life,” she says. “And so I realized that despite everything that I always said, I was going to… start a business.”

Shazi started the organic baby food company Healthy Baby in 2003, with the mission of impacting children's health through food. “I really saw this opportunity to kind of change children's outcomes by starting them off on the right foot with clean, healthy nutrition,” she tells Sam. She built Healthy Baby into a successful food company, but, she says, after her son was born and then later diagnosed with autism, she realized she needed to shift her focus to supporting her family. She sold Healthy Baby and plunged herself into researching the factors correlated with autism. Along the way, she developed a deep appreciation for all that impacts children’s development.

The difference a diaper can make

Shazi tells Sam that her research around children’s health and their environment was eye-opening. She realized there were many factors in addition to what they eat that have huge impacts on babies’ health. “One thing that's so exciting about the baby space is that when you can build products that live in a new parent’s home, you affect them on a day-to-day basis,” she says. 

Her focus landed on diapers—those everyday products that babies often spend their first three years in, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “This is an industry that had yet to be ever regulated,” she tells Sam. “And babies literally absorb everything that you put on their skin, through their skin, and it goes into the bloodstream right away. And we think about organic food because obviously what you eat, you want it to be clean, but there you have the benefit of your digestive system. And yet the skin is actually this huge organ that doesn't have the benefit of a digestive system to detox.”

Healthy diapers became a cornerstone of Shazi’s new company, Healthynest. The B Corp company’s mission is to fulfill each child's highest potential by supporting parents in their developmental health and outcomes. “And we do that by creating really elevated routines throughout the day, using products that ideally support their biological health so that we can focus on their developmental health,” she says.

Continuing her mission

Shazi shares that her first goal when launching Healthynest was to protect and enrich. “You protect by creating the safest biological environment for baby’s brain to develop in,” she says. “And then you enrich by creating activities and games and all kinds of basically therapeutic little fun things to do with baby that are actually building deeper neural pathways, but for a mom or dad, it's just a fun game.”

Shazi also discusses her philanthropic and investor efforts to encourage likeminded entrepreneurs. She says she truly loves backing founders who have “passion and vision and the ability to execute.” For instance, she was an early investor in EpiBone, a collaboration of the scientist Nina Tandon with Columbia University’s schools of business and medicine to develop the science to build human bones from stem cells.