How Rugabub began. The real story. All of it.

2017. The play mats that almost never existed.

In 2017, we were pregnant for the first time. We were so excited that we started designing play mats. Not because we were entrepreneurs looking for a market gap, but because we were parents-to-be who couldn’t find anything beautiful enough for the home we were building for our baby. Everything on the market was a colourful foam puzzle or a plasticky gym mat. Nothing that looked like it belonged in a thoughtfully designed home.

So we designed our own. A foam play mat that looked like a designer rug. Double-sided. Non-toxic TPU foam. Beautiful enough to leave out. We never got to use them. We lost that pregnancy at 19 weeks.

Over the next few years, we lost three more. We don’t share this for sympathy. We share it because it’s true, and because we know we are not alone. Infertility and pregnancy loss are carried quietly by so many families. We carried ours quietly too, while the play mat designs sat waiting in a folder on a computer.

2020. Our son arrived. Then COVID. Then Rugabub.

In 2020, we finally brought our beautiful baby boy into the world, a baby we had fought so hard and so long for that we hadn’t purchased a single thing before he arrived. The trauma of loss had made hope feel too dangerous.

After he arrived, we bought a simple grey play mat with white dots. It was fine. But our home still looked like a baby had taken over, not the warm, considered space we’d always imagined. Eight days after our son was born, my husband, a helicopter pilot, lost his job. COVID had grounded everything. We were scared. We were exhausted. We were completely in love with this baby we’d waited years for. And we were staring down a financial cliff.

So we dusted off the 2017 designs and launched Rugabub.

What happened next still takes our breath away.

We became the fastest-growing play mat company in Australia. Parents felt exactly what we had felt; that they deserved something beautiful, safe, and thoughtfully made. That a play mat didn’t have to be an eyesore. That non-toxic and gorgeous weren’t mutually exclusive.

Rugabub pioneered the rug-style play mat category in Australia already in 2017 (pre-launch) and the ripple effect has been felt across the industry worldwide. The double-sided design, the designer aesthetic, we shaped how modern play mats look and what parents now expect from them.

We were approached by companies that wanted to acquire us. We said no, because every offer came with conditions we couldn’t accept. They wanted to raise prices or cut quality. We’d built Rugabub specifically so that parents like us, parents who’d waited and hoped and lost and finally arrived, could afford something truly beautiful for their children.

The years that followed were the hardest of our lives.

Six more miscarriages. Years of unsuccessful IVF. Printing shipping labels from hospital beds. Answering customer emails between appointments. Putting the business first, even when everything in our personal lives was falling apart.

And then, while we were in the middle of IVF, we were scammed. A manufacturer disappeared with $130,000 worth of faulty stock, stock that was supposed to become the Rugaroo doll collection. We lost nearly everything we had built financially. We had to rebuild the entire business from scratch. The launch we’d planned for December 2023 was delayed by a full year. We almost closed.

Ginger. And the beginning of Rugaroo.

Rugaroo was born from something that happened years earlier, when my husband was posted to the Northern Territory as a helicopter pilot. I rescued a joey found in the pouch of a deceased wallaby near Katherine. I named him Ginger. I fed him every four hours. I carried him everywhere. I shared every adventure; he once ate my homework.

At eight months old, Ginger returned to the wild. It was a bittersweet, beautiful moment that forever shaped me. Every Rugaroo doll, every character, every story carries a piece of Ginger’s spirit, his cheekiness, his curiosity, his deep connection to the Australian landscape.

We finally launched Rugaroo two weeks before Christmas 2024. By launch day, my family had just $200 left in our account. Dazza the Tradie’s toolbox accessory sold out in 47 minutes. Within weeks, $200 had become $200,000. The Daily Telegraph called it one of the most remarkable small business comebacks they’d covered.

We have 30 Rugaroo characters planned. The world they live in is still being built; new animals, new accessories, new stories, new adventures. The grey nomads are coming. The wombats are coming. A few more secrets too. Meet the mob so far.

Why non-toxic was never negotiable.

From the very first design in 2017, Rugabub has used TPU foam, thermoplastic polyurethane, the same material used in medical devices. We chose it because it is the only foam that does not require formamide, a reproductive toxin, to be soft. No EVA. No PVC. No phthalates. No chemical smell when it arrives.

France and Belgium banned EVA play mats in 2010. Most of the market kept using it anyway. We never did. Every Rugabub play mat is independently tested to exceed toy safety regulations, certified for newborns, and made from materials we would put our own children on, because we have. Read our full safety story.

We are still here.

We still design everything with the same intention we had in 2017, to make something beautiful, safe, and worthy of the children and families who choose it. We still keep our prices fair, even when it costs us. We still answer every email like it matters.

Just over 100,000 play mats have been sold worldwide. Rugabub has been featured in The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, Mamamia, Real Living, Sunday Life, New Idea and more. We have won Australia’s most prestigious design award and the only Clean + Conscious Gold and Editor’s Choice ever awarded to a TPU play mat company.

None of that is why we get up in the morning. We get up in the morning because of the families. The parents who waited and hoped and lost and finally arrived, just like us. The ones who wanted something genuinely beautiful and genuinely safe for the children they fought so hard for.

Thank you for being part of this. Every single one of you.
~ Dana & the Rugabub family 🖤