StrollMe—Germany First Kids's Subscription—Powered by circuly

StrollMe was founded in 2020 by Sebastian Reichelt and Timon Beutel with a straightforward but ambitious idea: parents spend a small fortune on baby products their children use for a matter of months. Strollers, bikes, baby accessories — high-quality, high-cost items that sit in garages gathering dust once the child outgrows them. Why own, when you could subscribe?

The founders didn’t just want to build a business. They wanted to be part of a movement: one that shifts parents away from linear consumption toward a smarter, more circular way of thinking about the products that fill the first years of a child’s life.

“We want to be part of a movement. We want to bring this movement into your everyday life with your child. To bring awareness that we need to start making a change for that very child. To use our resources smarter.” — Timon Beutel, Co-Founder, StrollMe

The Background: Validation first, then scale

When StrollMe came to circuly back in 2021, they didn’t come with a problem. They came with momentum.

By the time they began evaluating operational software, StrollMe had already done the hard work of proving their concept. They had validated that parents in Germany were genuinely open to subscribing to baby products rather than buying them outright.

The model worked.

Customers were coming.

Products were being returned, refurbished by their in-house team, and redeployed to new families.

The challenge was no longer whether the idea resonated — it was whether their operations could keep up with the ambition.

The Challenge: Built to Grow, Not to Manage

As subscription numbers grew, it became clear that the tools StrollMe were using to manage their operations were not going to scale with them. They needed to make a choice: keep patching together workarounds, or find a proper operational backbone that would free them to

Challenge 1: No possibility for "buy & rent" in the same cart.

StrollMe aimed to offer a lot of flexibility to their customers and enable them to seamlessly "buy & rent" products within the same customer journey. However, their current e-commerce solutions lacked support for such a model.

Challenge 2: Manual operations hindered scalability.

Without a dedicated solution, StrollMe relied on spreadsheets to monitor their subscriptions. However, once they reached 50 subscriptions, managing operations became significantly more challenging due to the manual effort required, resulting in frequent errors. It was evident that automation was necessary, but no convenient tool was available to streamline processes effectively.

Challenge 3: No subscription overview to facilitate decision making.

In the absence of a dedicated solution that could provide a consolidated of all subscriptions, StrollMe couldn't track important subscription KPIs such as revenue per product and customer. This lack of visibility hindered the ability to make informed business decisions based on comprehensive data analysis.

"We had a long list of features for our subscription business and found what we were looking for at circuly. circuly works perfectly with our headless Shopify architecture and enables us to concentrate on our customers.” — Timon Beutel, Co-Founder, StrollMe

That list was long not because StrollMe was demanding, but because no other solution had been built to handle the specific complexity of physical product subscriptions. Most subscription software is designed for digital goods — software, media, services. StrollMe needed something built for the real world: products that ship, get used, come back, get refurbished, and go out again.

The Solution: A software solution designed for physical product subscriptions

circuly became the infrastructure layer that StrollMe needed to stop managing and start growing. The integration worked seamlessly with their existing headless Shopify architecture, meaning there was no need to rebuild what was already working — just add the operational backbone it was missing.

Solution 1: A white-label cart & checkout.

circuly's white-label cart and checkout solution not only made it possible for StrollMe to provide the flexibility they desired but also gave them the possibility to customise it according to their preferences.

• ✅ Rent & Sell in the same cart.
• ✅ Fit to branding.
• ✅ Custom fields in checkout.
• ✅ Country based shipping.

Solution 2: Automated operations & workflows facilitate scalability.

circuly enabled StrollMe to move away from their Spreadsheets and bring their existing subscriptions to the circuly Operations backend where they could truly automate their operations and scale their subscription business.

• ✅ Automated Billing & Invoicing.
• ✅ Automated transactional customer communication.
• ✅ Custom and automated flow for renewals and cancellation.

Solution 3:A dedicated system for detailed subscription overview.

Due to its API-enabled connection with the shop system and payment service provider, circuly is able to host a wide variety of information related to the subscription, product, customer, payment and more and thus enables StrollMe to have a 360° overview of all information.

• ✅ Everyday subscription KPIs to oversee your business' growth.
• ✅ Easy export of a wide variety of data points to be as data driven as you want.

The Results: A circular model that works at scale

Four years on, StrollMe is no longer proving a concept. They’re running a scaled operation that has fundamentally changed how thousands of German families access baby products.

50,000+ parents have used StrollMe’s subscription service — a number that reflects not just commercial traction, but genuine behaviour change. These are families who chose not to buy a stroller they’d use for 18 months and store for years. They chose the circular option instead.

Behind that number is an in-house refurbishment team that repairs and restores returned products so they can be redeployed to the next family. It’s not just a subscription model — it’s a full circular operation, and it works because the operational infrastructure can support it.

“The circuly software solution and the team behind it have supported the circularity of thousands of products and kept them away from landfills.” — Nick, Founder, circuly

‍

StrollMe didn’t need rescuing. They needed a partner who could match their ambition.

The shift from pilot to scaled operation required an infrastructure that could handle the full complexity of physical product subscriptions — the mixed carts, the automated workflows, the data visibility — so that the team could stay focused on the thing that actually drives the business: acquiring customers who believe in the circular model, and giving them an experience good enough to stay.

circuly provided the backbone. StrollMe built the movement.