Pumping The Market
In the days after giving birth, Alicia Segal was sore, exhausted, and trying to figure out how to feed her baby. Support was minimal, emotions were high, and when the nurse wheeled in a bulky electric breast pump, she was faced with the challenge of figuring out how it worked.
At just four days postpartum, the first-time mum was crawling behind the hospital bed, trying to plug in the pumping device before realising that nothing she did was going to work, because it was broken beyond repair.
“I just remember thinking, this cannot be it. This cannot be how new mums are expected to do this,” Alicia tells M2 Woman. “It was a device that hadn’t been updated since the 1950s, how is that accepted as the norm?”
That moment is bittersweet to reflect on for Alicia and her partner Ari Segal. While incredibly raw and difficult at the time, it was also the spark for Bubka, the now-cult-status wearable breast pump brand run entirely by the Sydney-based couple.
Built in the cracks between nap times, swift career changes, and 3 a.m. feeds, the pair have used every spare second to not only make a huge part of motherhood accessible and simple for new mums, but also proved that you can turn postpartum frustration into something powerful and with a new range set to be released in September, they’re not slowing down anytime soon.
The First ‘Let’s Do This’ Conversation
The idea for Bubka didn’t come out of nowhere. In the lead-up to having their first baby, Ari and Alicia were already deep in research mode, trying to wrap their heads around feeding options and breast pumps. What they found was disheartening: the few wearable pumps available at the time were priced at over $700 AUD.
“We were just like… surely not,” Ari says. “That’s a huge cost, especially for something you might not even know will work for you.”
Ari, the risktaker of the pair, already had experience in sourcing wearable devices from a side hustle he’d been running and after some research, confirmed what the pair already knew.
“We were walking down Newcastle Street, Ari turns to me and says, ‘There’s this massive gap in the breast pump market, we should really commit.’ I was eight months pregnant, overwhelmed and I just said, ‘I cannot deal with this right now,’” Alicia recalls.
The idea was put in the back pocket, but once Alicia experienced first-hand just how dire the pumping situation was in the hospital and how isolating it was pumping at home, it was full steam ahead even despite the cost.
“Had I known what Ari spent to get those samples, I would’ve absolutely shut it down,” Alicia laughs. “But seeing them, holding one in my hand and then using it? That changed everything.”
She realised quickly this wasn’t just a clever product, it was a necessary one. Something mums actually needed and in the minimal free time the couple had, they began building Bubka.
The Push From Side Hustle to Full-Time Business
In the first few months of Bubka, Ari was working his 40-hour-a-week job and another 10-15 hours a week on Bubka: “I was leaving the house before 7am even though I started at 9am, just to give myself two guaranteed hours a day to work on the business.”
It was a bit of a passion project, an exciting side hustle until Ari’s job was impacted by a company restructure and they were faced with the now or never decision.
“No one wants to go through that,” Alicia says. “But it gave us a nudge. The kind we didn’t ask for, but maybe needed.”
They went all in. Ari took the lead on operations. Alicia, fresh into motherhood, became Bubka’s first tester and biggest truth-teller: “We were building this for me, but also for every mum who felt stuck, tethered, and overwhelmed.”
Bubka grew, one product and one real mum story at a time, it was a comfortable pace for the pair and a few months later, when Olympian Jana Pittman posted about Bubka online, orders exploded overnight. Ari was sending out up to 100 products a day, until they completely sold out, the five star reviews were rolling in and the couple knew they were on the right track.
Pumping, But Make It Portable
At the heart of Bubka’s mission is a simple belief: Mums deserve freedom. Freedom to move, to work, to leave the house and live life, and nourish their babies on their own terms.
Their signature product, a wearable, cordless breast pump, was just the beginning. Now, Alicia and Ari are on the cusp of launching an innovative new range, designed to make pumping and breastfeeding feel less like a logistical nightmare and more like a seamless part of real life.
“It’s not just about pumping while doing laundry,” Alicia says. “It’s about pumping while at dinner, in the middle of the night, while at work, while living. There is this stigma that you’re a working
mum and you need to pump during the day, you have to slip away to the toilet cubicle. You don’t have to do that with Bubka.”
The new range, set to land online near the end of September, includes compact storage, cleaning kits, and pump bags that look more like chic handbags than baby gear, there is also a new pump based product that is a first of its kind. It’s exciting but it’s also been a challenge and Ari admits that educating himself in the market has been tough, especially around accessories and support tools that don’t yet exist in the mainstream.
“There’s no blueprint,” he says. “We’re creating products and categories that haven’t been seen before and in order to get it right, we’ve leaned heavily into collaboration with IBCLCs (International Board Certified Lactation Consultant’s), midwives, and the birth worker community to ensure everything we make is not only practical but supportive and safe.”
Two Kids, One Start-Up, Zero Spare Time
Outside of Bubka, Alicia and Ari are co-parenting two young boys (aged one and three), and they admit there’s no such thing as balance.
“We’re really tired,” Alicia half heartedly jokes. “It’s sort of funny like we could go from talking about who is picking up the kids from daycare and in the same sentence ask ‘did you answer that email we got from our manufacturer?’ The lines are very blurred. We’re in a very hands-on season of our lives right now.”
What that means is while date nights may have taken a backseat, they still prioritise each other and take a break when they need it. “We’re not perfect,” Ari says. “But we’re aligned. And we’re all in for our kids, our community, our business and each other.”
A Legacy Bigger Than Product
At the core of it all, Ari and Alicia are just two people trying to do something meaningful. They’ve seen first-hand how overwhelming early parenthood can be and they’ve turned that insight into action.
What keeps them going isn’t sales or scale, it’s the stories, the messages of real-life moments when a mum tells them Bubka helped her pump on a work trip, or more recently, seeing people using Bubka in public.
“That’s the stuff that gets us,” Alicia says. “Those moments remind us why we’re doing this. We’re not here to be a perfect brand, we’re just here to be a useful one.”
They’re building something they hope will outlast the baby years. Not just a pump, not even just a brand but a support system and a movement that reminds parents they’re not alone, that it’s okay to cry in the car, that pumping doesn’t have to be a full-blown production.
“We’ll go out again one day,” Ari laughs. “But for now, we’re building something that matters and that’s more than enough.”
