Meet the CEO who turned the Swedish NoseFrida into a huge hit with American parents of babies
Beth Greenfield
Updated 8 min read
Ask any new parent about the NoseFrida—an ingenious device by which a parent sucks mucus out of a congested baby’s nostrils—and you’re bound to get the same reaction I did when mentioning it to coworkers with infants at home: breathless excitement, and declarations of “It’s the best!”
As the mom of a 16-year-old, I’m admittedly out of the baby-product loop. And while I did use the NoseFrida godsend when my daughter was a baby, it was largely a hippie-mom, word-of-mouth thing back then.
So I was pretty surprised to get an update on the product: Originally developed by a pediatrician in Sweden, where the NasFrida became the norm for snot sucking, the device was soon distributed in the U.S. exclusively by a Swedish mother of teens living in Miami. And in 2010, in a move that would change the course of American babycare, she gave one to her neighbor, new mom and in-house Marlins attorney Chelsea Hirschhorn.
“I was like, this is amazing. Why didn’t anybody tell me about this?” Hirschhorn says today, recalling when she first tried it on her sick son.
NoseFrida products
Eventually, the distributor asked her neighbor if she was interested in buying the business. “She loved the product. But she didn't really know how to scale the business,” says Hirschhorn. “And she had no real interest in being a road warrior…selling it to anyone who would listen.”
But Hirschhorn, who was “on the front lines, day in and day out, living these parenting pain points in real time,” was intrigued. She signed an agreement, scrawled on a paper napkin, in her neighbor’s living room, and eventually bought the IP address and global business from the partners in Sweden, too.
Now she’s launching an arresting new advertising campaign to celebrate the 10th anniversary of her wildly successful relaunch of Frida—a consistently profitable company that sells 4.7 million of its snotsuckers annually (more than the yearly total of U.S. babies born), representing a 54% market share in the nasal aspirator category. It counts three lines—Frida Baby, Frida Mom, and Frida Fertility—with over 150 products, along with its original pièce de résistance, earning prime retail spots in Target and Walmart.
“I'm not so sure I ever had the unequivocal conviction that it would go mainstream,” Hirschhorn, 40, now a mom of four kids between the ages of 2 and 11, says of the NoseFrida. “But I had the unequivocal conviction that everyone needed it.”
She credits her “blind naivete” for going all in on a product with such a built-in yuck factor (despite the fact that baby's mucus never goes anywhere near your own mouth).
And that, it seems, was enough.
“We actually adapted American consumer behavior,” she says. “We showed them a better way.”
Building and expanding Frida
Right away, Hirschhorn began taking any meeting she could. And she got feedback that would guide her expansion and vision of the company: “They would say, ‘This is amazing. But we don’t deal with one-product companies,” she recalls. “So it was like…I don’t know how to make other products!”
She quickly learned—taking inspiration from her kids. When her nine-month-old got his first ear infection and needed antibiotics, for example, it was a three-person job to give him medicine. “One would hold his hands down, the other would keep his mouth open, and I would put the medicine in—and I’d still end up covered in pink,” she recalls. That led to the creation of the Accu-dose Paci, a pacifier with a syringe through which a baby can slowly take medicine into the side of their cheek.
Similarly, she struggled to brush her toddler’s teeth and had a lightbulb moment when she noticed the more ingenious design of dog toothbrushes, borrowing design elements to create a three-sided Training Toothbrush.
“The vision materialized as my parenting experiences evolved and took shape,” she explains, adding that she was the first consumer-products brand to have a booth at the American Academy of Pediatrics conference, where long lines formed for Fridababy product samples.
“It was a no-brainer to me that if I could get [pediatricians’] support and the credibility that would come along with it, it was a really effective tactic for us,” she says.
She also relies heavily on the wisdom of her 152 employees—who, collectively, have 70 kids under the age of 10. “We don’t do focus groups, ever,” she says.
Another part of the entrepreneur’s approach was also personal: to provide a counterbalance to the polished parenting images that dominated social media at the time.
“I struggled as a parent in this category finding something real and relatable,” Hirschhorn says, referring to 2014 to 2016, when “filtered images of picture-perfect parenthood was the thing, and it felt so inauthentic to what I was experiencing.”
It’s what made her want to build the Frida brand in a way that was as authentic as possible. “Not to scare people,” she explains, “but in an effort to really prepare people, like, ‘Yes, this is what you're seeing on Instagram. However, this is the real side of parenthood. And sometimes it's dark and gross, and the problems that we face are not fun, but the brand will do its part to infuse some levity and some light-heartedness at the end of the day.” And by being honest, Hirschhorn believed, Frida would be the “best friend no one has,” who would tell you how raising babies really was.
It sure was prescient, if what she believes is true—that parenting culture has shifted into having “less pressure on perfection.” And that, she adds, is something she takes “a tiny fleck of credit” for.
“Parenthood is something you're uniquely ill-equipped for. There's no manual,” the CEO notes. “So we really had to build a brand that lifted the veil on some of these pain points, very thoughtfully and strategically.” To do that, she knew the brand had to be both soothing (cue the Scandinavian aesthetic and package characters) and honest, all “without grossing people out when they have three seconds at a Target store.”
Pushing the envelope: ‘We showed nipple’
The newest NoseFrida poster campaign is admittedly both gross and cute—featuring the closeup faces of adorable babies (including Hirschhorn’s daughter and niece) slick with mucus. And its latest Instagram posts are both gross and hilarious—including the comments from parents praising the NoseFrida’s effectiveness (“My boss' daughter had a piece of dry dog food stuck up her nose, that thing came right out no problem!”)
Earlier advertising moments were controversial—especially a 60-second TV spot for disposable postpartum underwear slated to run during the 2020 Oscars that wound up rejected by ABC for being “too graphic.”
It came as a shock to Hirschhorn, and left her feeling “terrible” and “really upset.” But just a year later, she successfully ran a shockingly realistic spot for a line of breastfeeding support products—including a lactation massager and nipple balm—during the Golden Globes broadcast.
“We showed nipple, we showed breastfeeding women,” she says. “That was sort of a big milestone.”
It was also the perfect funnel for her anger over the banned ad—something she still feels today, considering the brand still faces “a lot of rejection,” in both traditional and social media and in merchandising displays. “It comes in the form of nudity or content censorship, or blurred nipples, or you can't teach a woman about a perineal massage but I can show a G-string on the Girls Gone Wild Instagram feed that is the same body part—literally the same—with like, a two-inch piece of material covering it.”
Hirschhorn admits that being so at ease with the body and its functions is a quality hard-won rather than ingrained. “My mom threw me into the bathroom with the box of tampons and that little instruction manual,” she shares, “and was like, figure it out.”
She yearns for women—whether adolescent or postpartum—to not face that same lack of support about their bodies.
The future of Frida
To help circumvent some of the limits of advertising, Frida recently launched a new platform: Frida Uncensored, which calls itself “a stripped down resource for women, by women.” It features how-to videos on topics from at-home insemination prenatal perineal massage to lactation massage and treating cracked nipples—all with cleverly designed Frida products, natch.
“It’s not graphic for graphic’s sake, or sensational sake, but informative, educational context,” she explains of the content, which serves as a powerful extension of the fertility line, which launched in 2023 and has seen "explosive growth."
Stacked from 3 images. Method=B (R=8,S=4)
“Your whole life you're taught how not to have a baby, right? It's literally the start and stop of sex ed. And then when you need to have a baby, you Google ‘how to have a baby.’ ‘Best sex positions.’ ‘Time of the month.’ ‘What should I eat?’ ‘What shouldn't I eat?’” She decided the company had the resources to step in with some solid info.
Similarly, the impetus behind the postpartum care line, she says, was being “totally disillusioned and disappointed with the medical professional offerings.” Now, she says, medical professionals have been approaching Frida, asking for ways to offer their patients its products.
“It’s very meta,” she says, adding that she doesn’t fault obstetricians or pediatricians for failing to offer helpful items. She’s happy to keep doing that. Plus, she understands doctors have different priorities.
“They were spending their time on baby care, right? Their goal was a healthy baby,” she says. “We put mom at the center of that. We kind of shifted the narrative, like, you can do both. I don’t think they are mutually exclusive.”
