5 Reasons Why Collaboration Over Competition Wins Every Time
KENDRA KOCH, HEAD OF MARKETING AT RENT-A-ROMPER
One of the reasons we love the HeyMama community is the overall spirit of collaboration over competition. It’s not every place that you can say you genuinely feel supported and inspired, but with HeyMama, that’s exactly how we feel.
Why choose collaboration over competition? Here are five ways we believe it’s the better way to go.
Competition is lonely
You’d think competition in the workplace is a necessary part of inspiring employees to improve, but competition can bring out the worst in people and make the working environment an unhealthy one. Beyond that, competition is inherently isolating. With a pandemic, distributed workforces, and work-from-home-while-parenting challenges, the last thing we need is to be more isolated.
Focusing on your competitors means you’re forgetting about your customers
While understanding your market is important, if you’re constantly looking at what your competitors are doing, you’re probably missing out on opportunities to see what your customers want. Also, by focusing on the competition, you’ll be trying to catch up instead of forging your own, more authentic path (which may be a better, more innovative one!).
Collaborators can help you save time and money
As a new business trying to change the way parents shop for clothes, we run into countless challenges. By choosing to collaborate, we can often find someone who has met a similar challenge and can teach us the way through (or can at least point out pitfalls that we should look out for so we don’t make avoidable mistakes along the way). When working with small budgets and huge to-do lists, any learnings we can piggyback from others provide critical shortcuts to success. Recently, we even acquired a fellow HeyMama member’s company in order to increase our inventory, and improve our ability to curate super cute and functional capsule wardrobes for babies and toddlers.
Collaborators work for, not against you
Approaching people in business with a competitive spirit often puts people on the defensive and motivates them to work against you. By choosing collaboration over competition, you can inspire anyone—customers, employees, and even other businesses—to help you with your goals. From outsourcing our CFO to curating clothing from fellow HeyMama member-owned children’s wear brands, we regularly collaborate with HeyMama members to fill gaps in our business. And, our customers regularly provide feedback, testimonials and referrals.
Collaboration can help you meet shared goals more quickly
Collaboration is a huge part of our marketing strategy, and the HeyMama community has been an incredible resource for us when looking for potential marketing partners. By partnering with other brands, we can meet shared goals more effectively by pooling resources, leveraging each other’s audiences, and swapping advice.
About Rent-a-Romper: Rent-a-Romper is a subscription-based clothing rental service offering curated capsule wardrobes for babies and toddlers that grow with each child. Rent-a-Romper was designed to carry the mental load of shopping while reducing the burden of clothing on the environment. Use code HEYMAMA40 for 40% off your first two months.