In St. Louis, Missouri, sisters Jane Molina and Joy Williams were juggling more than most. They were running their family’s struggling heating and cooling company while raising five young children between them, still clawing back from the fallout of the financial crisis. Money was so tight that, as Williams recalls, they were paying employees first and hoping there would be enough left to cover groceries.
Amid that pressure, a quiet moment with a newborn sparked a new idea. While breastfeeding her third son, Molina noticed he often latched not for milk, but for comfort. She went looking for a pacifier that truly mimicked the feel and movement of breast tissue and encouraged a wide, natural latch. Nothing on the market came close.
Molina began sketching out a solution: an ultra-soft silicone pacifier that would behave more like a breast than a plug. She took the idea to Williams, whose marketing experience could turn a sketch into a brand. Williams hesitated; the HVAC business was barely staying afloat. But the need felt urgent and deeply personal, and eventually she agreed to take the leap.
They named the company Ninni Co., after their grandmother, who breastfed 10 children and called nursing “the ninni.” For seven years, the sisters built the venture in the margins of their lives, working nights and weekends, leaning on family support, draining savings and retirement accounts to fund a prototype and secure a patent.
They ultimately sold the HVAC company for $500,000, much of it already spoken for by vendor debt, and poured what remained into Ninni Co. Grants and incubator programs helped them refine the design and line up a manufacturer in upstate New York. A bank loan, won after Molina pulled a prototype from a small box over coffee with a lender whose wife was breastfeeding, paid for the expensive production mold. An early $70,000 angel investment bought them time, at the cost of a sizable equity stake.
They launched quietly on Shopify with a modest inventory and stock photos. Sales trickled in until a TikTok repost of an Instagram reel by an influencer friend suddenly sent orders surging. The sisters had just a few dozen pacifiers on hand and a few hundred more at the factory, but they turned scarcity into strategy, teasing limited drops and new colors to build anticipation.
Revenue climbed from $2.2 million to $2.9 million, then to $5.3 million last year, as Ninni Co. grew into a direct-to-consumer brand selling more than 1,000 pacifiers a day. The company now has eight employees, and the sisters have bought back most of the equity they once sold.
They insist on manufacturing in the United States, sourcing primarily from the U.S. and Sweden, even though it squeezes margins and rules out some mass-market channels. A brief experiment with Amazon ended quickly; the platform siphoned traffic from their website, held funds for weeks and took a steep cut. The sisters decided they would rather own the relationship with their customers than chase every possible sale.
Today, Ninni Co. is as much a community as a product line, anchored on Instagram and Facebook, where parents share stories of babies soothed and sleep reclaimed. Molina and Williams have turned down multiple buyout offers, determined to remain the “two moms behind the dream” who built a multimillion-dollar business from a simple, sleepless question: what if there were a better way to comfort a baby?
