Baby Monitor Leader Owlet on Growing Market Share by Leaning Into Connected Health Trends

Small business takeaway:

• Owlet’s growth from smart baby monitor to connected health platform underscores a broader shift: Products are becoming ongoing services. For businesses of any size, three strategic signals stand out: Proprietary data can unlock recurring revenue; adjacent services like telehealth can extend customer relationships; and in trust-based categories, education and credibility are as central to growth as the technology itself.

As a young newlywed about to start a family, Kurt Workman worried about sudden infant death syndrome, which impacted his extended family. His wife, Shea, also had a heart condition as an infant. He wanted to protect their children as babies, and beyond.

So, the Brigham Young University student and a few classmates created a Smart Sock, the precursor to Owlet’s Dream Sock baby monitor, that would continuously track a baby’s pulse rate and oxygen levels while sleeping, giving parents health data like heart rate and oxygen levels and sending them alerts if needed. They won the Student Innovator of the Year award for their project, then launched Owlet in 2015 selling direct to consumer.

Smart Sock sales took off; the company started selling on Amazon and major retailers like Target and Walmart and through Babylist in 2018.

Today, Owlet is a $105.7 million leader in the baby monitor category, generating second-quarter 2026 revenue of  $33.9 million, up 29.9% year over year.

Owlet operates in the global smart baby monitor market, which is projected to surge from $2.3 billion in 2025 to $4.8 billion by 2033, driven by rising demand from tech-savvy parents, according to Research and Markets. It has carved out its niche by riding the connected health wave, attracting the same data-driven consumers who swear by their Oura rings and Apple watches.

“We’ve focused on making the business more profitable, and we expect our profits to grow by over 200% this year,” said Owlet Chief Parent Officer Liz Teran. “We really want to build a financially strong company that can hold up if things get tough [such as] a slowdown or new trade tariffs.”

Owlet navigates an early roadblock and employee pay cuts that threaten to derail the business 

But growth didn’t come easy. Three years after launching at national retailers, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent a letter: They considered Owlet a medical device. The company would need clearance to continue selling its products. Instead of letting the road bump derail the company, Owlet rallied and got creative during a difficult period. Its entire staff took pay cuts for a year as the business worked with the FDA for two years to obtain clearance, Teran said.

Owlet ultimately received approval for Dream Sock, the first FDA-cleared smart baby monitor, and relaunched the product with updated packaging and messaging.

Even as the company pivoted, its core customer base stayed consistent: first-time parents anxious about bringing a newborn home, with over 30% of the brand’s customers working in healthcare themselves. “They see the benefit of having that health information at home,” said Teran.

In January 2025, Owlet added another component to its offerings: Owlet360, a move to transform itself from a hardware maker into a data platform. The subscription service draws on data Owlet has accumulated since its founding — over 1.7 million babies monitored and 17 trillion heartbeats tracked — giving parents personalized insights and weekly trend reports on pulse rates, oxygen levels, and movement.

The platform has amassed over 115,000 subscribers. At the same time, the brand has been careful to keep its live monitoring and real-time notifications free of charge in line with its stated mission to improve access to at-home infant care.

Owlet captured 41% of all dollars spent on baby monitors in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 24% from the same period a year earlier, according to data from Circana and Owlet, while generating a record $3.2 million in subscription revenue in the second quarter of 2026.

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Leaning into word of mouth, its most powerful marketing tool: ‘We know parents like to hear from fellow parents’

For Teran, marketing Owlet’s products and services has been “one of the most fun marketing challenges of my career,” she said. The combination of a highly regulated product, customers constantly entering the market as babies are born, and exiting as they age out (Owlet is cleared up to 18 months old) means “you’re always in acquisition mode.”

A higher price point ($299.99 for the Dream Sock) also means customer education is essential, Teran said. “The success of our marketing has hinged on one thing: The product itself works and does what we say it does. Parents have experienced such a life-changing event from using the products that they’re our major drivers of awareness.”

Over 50% of Owlet’s customers had a friend or family member tell them about Owlet. “Word of mouth is huge,” Teran said. Meanwhile, Owlet’s digital marketing campaign focuses on universal themes around being a parent, like how to get enough sleep with a newborn in the house, and the ways in which the company’s products fit into that.

“We know parents like to hear from fellow parents,” she said. Owlet doesn’t have a paid influencer program. Instead, it sends its products to celebrities, who often post about them because they work, Teran said, like country pop singer Jessie James Decker and Ashley Tisdale, known for “High School Musical.”

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Subscriptions and 24/7 telehealth to fuel Owlet’s next growth chapter

Most recently this spring, the company took its connected health strategy a step further: It began a phased rollout of Owlet OnCall, a telehealth service embedded directly in its app that gives parents round-the-clock access to board-certified pediatricians by chat or phone, with no appointment necessary.

“As a parent myself, I know that 3 a.m. panic all too well,” Teran said. “Rushing to urgent care or sitting in an ER for hours, only to leave feeling like you could have gotten that same reassurance from a quick conversation with your pediatrician. That’s exactly the gap Owlet OnCall is designed to close.”

Going forward, the brand sees U.S. subscriptions and telehealth as key growth drivers. Critical to that growth, Teran said, is continued, meaningful customer education on what differentiates Owlet in the baby monitor market.

And this spring Owlet wrapped up clinical trials for FDA clearance to extend the Dream Sock’s use to children up to age 5. “We plan to re-release the extended age version, and we’re hoping to launch in 2027,” Teran said. “The more information that we can offer parents, the better health outcomes we can have,” Teran said. “I’m really optimistic for the future of our category.”

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