Babylist | Milou Modern Bath Range
Milou is Babylist's own bath accessories brand for babies and toddlers, sold exclusively through the Babylist store. Enki designed three of the launch products from the ground up: a rinse cup with a soft silicone forehead edge, a wall-mounted toy storage bin with integrated drainage, and a set of ten stacking cups with perforated water-play holes. All three are BPA-free, dishwasher safe, and retail between $9.95 and $19.95. The brief came to Enki through Gembah, and the ask was clear: design a bath range that looks like it belongs in a designed bathroom, not one that gets hidden after the child goes to bed.
Routine, by Design
The Problem
Baby bath accessories are a commodity market. The leaders (Skip Hop, Munchkin, Frida Baby) compete on function, safety certifications, and bright primary colours that signal "child" at ten paces. The products work, and they sell, but they are designed to be stuffed into a caddy or suctioned to tile, not placed on a shelf. For Babylist, whose Milou brand carries the line "Designed for routine, but never ordinary," the products had to hold a higher standard: modern enough to sit in a designed bathroom, practical enough to survive daily use by a toddler, and priced within reach of the established competition. The harder constraint was coherence. A rinse cup, a wall-mounted storage bin, and a set of ten nesting cups share almost nothing in geometry, scale, or use pattern. Designing each one well was straightforward. Making all three feel like siblings, so that a parent picking up any one of them would sense, without reading a label, that the other two belonged alongside it, was the real brief.
A Category That Lives on a Hook
The Innovation
The Milou Palette
The three products were designed around a shared CMF system rather than drawn individually and colour-matched afterward. Two colourways run across the family: White/Mint and White/Taupe, each built on the same warm base white with a single accent colour, so the products read as a set on a bathroom shelf without needing to be placed side by side. The material specification locked to BPA-free, BPS-free, PVC-free, phthalate-free injection-moulded plastic across all three, safe enough that a teething toddler could put any piece in their mouth without concern.
The rinse cup set the design language. Its Soft Edge, a flexible silicone strip bonded to the rim, rests against a baby's forehead during hair rinsing and keeps water from running into the eyes. That detail, gentle radii, clean parting lines, and surfaces that feel warm rather than clinical, carried forward into the bin and the cups. The toy bin follows the same surface language but adds drainage holes sized to pass water without catching small fingers, paired with a hook-and-pad wall mount that lifts off for dishwasher cleaning. The stacking cups carry perforated water-play holes and numbered faces, with each of the ten cups stepping through a muted colour gradient that stays inside the Milou palette. Baby Joyce in China manufactured all three SKUs, and the products launched as Babylist exclusives, earning between 4.6 and 4.9 stars across their first eighty-plus reviews.
Our Role
What we achieved
Enki led ground-up industrial design and design for manufacture across three Milou bath products, delivered through Gembah. Scope covered concept development, shared CMF definition across both colourways, detailed design of the rinse cup (including the silicone Soft Edge overmould), toy bin (including wall-mount mechanism and drainage pattern), and stacking cups (including water-flow hole sizing and colour gradient specification). Enki supported supplier evaluation and carried the products through to factory handoff for tooling and production.
“A single product can be good by accident. A range of products that feel like one family can only happen by design."
- Ben Jones, Founder, Enki Product Development.
