Elysia Krstevski didn’t know what ecommerce was four years ago. She spent 15 years in musical theatre, working her way from receptionist to co-CEO of a company with 6,000 students. Today she runs Mekė Baby, the brand behind Australia’s first portable milk warmer, she’s in the 2026 Top 50 People in eCommerce, and she’s the face of Australia Post’s national small-business campaign.
The whole thing started with a bad moment. During Covid, dealing with mastitis and unable to breastfeed, Elysia was stuck in a supermarket with a screaming baby and no way to warm expressed milk. You couldn’t touch anything, there was no microwave, and she couldn’t feed her daughter in time. That night she went looking for a product that would let her warm milk anywhere, found nothing, and decided to build it.
Here’s what we took from the conversation.
Build the Brand Before the Product
Most founders build the product first and figure out the brand later. Elysia did it the other way around. She created Mekė Baby before she had anything to sell, because she wanted to be clear on what it stood for first. Product development then ran for roughly three years, from early 2020 to the first launch in April 2023.
She knew exactly what the product had to do. A tank you pour milk into, not a bottle you twist on, because the twist-on competitors leaked and customers didn’t trust them. Fast heating, but gentle enough to protect the milk, because breastmilk is precious. The clarity on the outcome came first, and the engineering followed.
Test With the Big Dogs Early
Most founders hold back from influential people until the product is perfect. Elysia went the opposite way. Once she had a prototype, she handed it to high-profile new mums, including Kayla Itsines and Steph Claire Smith, and to anyone she knew with a baby.
I didn’t look at it like that. At the end of the day, they’re mums. Anything that’s going to make their feeding journey easier, I knew this would help them.
Elysia Krstevski, Founder and CEO, Mekė Baby
That willingness to get it into real hands early is what created the buzz at launch, because there was nothing else like it and everyone she gave it to wanted to talk about it. The validation that mattered most, though, came first from her husband, who didn’t take the idea seriously until she made a bottle with it on a flight and he was sold.
Get Under the Hood of Your Own Meta Account
Elysia used to hand her Meta ads to an agency. Now she runs everything herself, and she’s blunt that if you’re an ecommerce brand, you have to learn it. The reason isn’t cost, it’s that the founder sees the whole picture in a way an agency never can.
Her example says it all. One of the most common questions in the DMs was whether you can heat frozen breastmilk in the warmer. An agency would never see that. Elysia took the question, turned it into an ad, launched it overnight, and it was already driving sales the next morning.
You know your customer better than anyone else. You see what each ad is costing you, and the month ahead makes so much more sense. You’re not going in blindly.
Elysia Krstevski, Founder and CEO, Mekė Baby
She’s clear that Meta built the brand’s awareness and she’d still recommend it to start out. What’s changed is that the algorithm now does the heavy lifting and it’s all about the creative, which suits a founder who came from a storytelling background.
You Can Copy the Product, But Not the Brand
Four months postpartum, Elysia got hit by a competitor that replicated everything: the website, the product, the copy, the ads, like for like. She started down the legal path, found it exhausting, and decided the better answer was to out-create them.
She messaged Adrian Portelli, who she went to high school with, and asked to borrow his jet. Within a week she’d shot a mini film to launch her Black Range for Black Friday, custom dress, Lamborghini, the lot. Ridiculous for a baby brand, and exactly the point.
You can copy the website, you can try and copy the product, but you can’t copy my brand and the creativeness I bring to it.
Elysia Krstevski, Founder and CEO, Mekė Baby
She dropped the legal case. The competitor, as far as she knows, isn’t really around anymore, because staying ahead of a product like this is genuinely hard. On the threat of a giant like Kmart copying her, she’s relaxed for the same reason: they’d almost certainly ship a worse version, because of how much work goes into getting the performance right.
Redefine What Growth Means
For the first three years the goal was market validation and brand awareness. Elysia is now open that chasing top-line revenue on Meta stopped making sense once she factored in cost of goods, warehousing, staffing and tax. Scaling too fast, she reckons, is where you make expensive mistakes.
That’s the logic behind going into Baby Bunting nationally in July 2026, after years of deliberately turning down big retailers to protect the brand. A retail partner sitting exactly where her customers already are means she’s no longer burning cash chasing a 3x ROAS. She had to prove the category existed first, since Baby Bunting told her early on they had no data on it, and the product went on to become the number one seller on their marketplace before it even hit shelves.
Protect the Things AI Can’t Do
Elysia uses AI heavily and says she doesn’t remember running the business without it, from pulling the top customer issues out of Claude to speeding up strategy and creative. But she’s drawn a hard line at customer service.
My team says stay out of the DMs. I say no, I want to talk to these people. Some of them are still our biggest cheerleaders in the community.
Elysia Krstevski, Founder and CEO, Mekė Baby
She’ll use AI to triage the inbox and flag what’s urgent, but not to auto-reply, because the personal relationship with customers is something she never wants to give up. It’s a useful signal for where a founder’s time is genuinely irreplaceable. In a baby brand, where the window before a customer outgrows you is brutally short, that direct connection is part of what turns a one-time buyer into a long-term advocate, and it’s why she’s building an ecosystem from milk warmer through to the Go-Box for solids to keep customers for years rather than months.
The Takeaway
Elysia’s edge isn’t the product, even though the product is good. It’s that she built a brand with a clear story, got it into real hands early, learned the numbers herself, and refused to compete on the things anyone can copy. She’s now shifting from scaling at all costs to building the systems and the team that make growth sustainable, which is the right move for a founder who spent three years proving the category exists and now has to run the company like it’s here to stay.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did Mekė Baby start? Founder Elysia Krstevski came up with the idea during Covid, when she was stuck in a supermarket with a hungry baby, dealing with mastitis, and had no way to safely warm expressed breastmilk. She searched for a product that let her warm milk anywhere, found nothing, and spent roughly three years developing Australia’s first portable milk warmer, launching in April 2023.
Should founders run their own Meta ads or use an agency? Elysia moved her Meta account in-house and argues ecommerce founders have to learn it, because the founder sees the full picture and the customer better than anyone. Her example: a frequent DM question about heating frozen breastmilk became an ad she launched overnight, which drove sales immediately. She still credits Meta for building brand awareness and recommends it for starting out.
How do you protect a product that’s easy to copy? Mekė Baby holds design registrations across Australia, New Zealand and the UK, but Elysia’s stronger view is that brand is the real defence. When a competitor copied everything, she out-created them with a cinematic campaign rather than a drawn-out legal fight, on the logic that a product can be copied but a brand and its creativity cannot.
Why did Mekė Baby move into Baby Bunting after avoiding retail? For years the strategy was selective distribution to protect the brand, but chasing top-line revenue on Meta stopped making sense once all the costs were factored in. Baby Bunting put the brand exactly where its customers already shop, reducing reliance on expensive ad spend. Elysia first had to prove the category existed, and the product became the top seller on Baby Bunting’s marketplace before hitting shelves.
Based on Episode #654 of the Add To Cart podcast with Elysia Krstevski Founder and CEO of Meke Baby. Join the Add To Cart community for free
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