Little Bellies: Building a brand asset worth protecting

What the Little Bellies v Aldi copyright case tells us about investing in, building and protecting brand value.

In 2017, Little Bellies was a small but fast-growing Australian challenger that had carved out a distinctive opportunity in baby snacking. There was a great product and a growing commercial opportunity. But the brand itself wasn’t yet distinctive or ownable enough to support where the founders wanted to take the business.

So we set out to change that.

I was fortunate enough to lead the strategy and marketing work behind the rebrand, working closely with founders Clive and Steven Sher and our creative partners B&B Studio in London. The new brand hit shelves in 2018. One of the objectives explicitly written into the brief was to protect the brand from the threat of private label.

Nearly a decade later, that feels rather prescient.

In August 2026, the Full Court of the Federal Court handed down its decision in the long-running copyright dispute involving Little Bellies owner Hampden Holdings and Aldi. Both Aldi’s appeal and Hampden’s cross-appeal succeeded in part, with five Aldi Mamia packaging designs ultimately found to infringe copyright in Bellies packaging works. There’s an important legal story in that.

But having been involved in creating the brand and its creative world, and then being part of the team growing Little Bellies for a number of years afterwards, I think there’s an equally interesting brand and business story sitting behind it.

Brands create value. But first you have to create the asset.

At founder + future, we talk a lot about brand as a business asset. Done well, a strong brand can drive growth, pricing power, efficiency and profitability. It can influence consumers and retailers, guide innovation and decision-making, and create purpose and direction throughout an organisation. Ultimately, intangible brand assets can create very tangible shareholder value. But those outcomes don’t appear from nowhere.

Someone has to create the asset in the first place.

Little Bellies is a great example of what that process can look like. The rebrand wasn’t simply an investment in making the packs look better. Of course, we wanted Little Bellies to be more appealing, joyful and compelling. Being attractive to consumers matters. But the ambition was much bigger than that.

We knew there was a valuable business opportunity, and we wanted to create something distinctive and genuinely ownable around it – something the business could keep building value from.

We went to London to work with B&B Studio, deliberately bringing an international perspective to a brand we wanted to stand apart in Australia and ultimately be capable of travelling internationally. Together, we got underneath what the founders believed, the opportunity in the category and what Little Bellies could uniquely own.

That thinking was captured and codified into a brand strategy and system that other people could understand, use and build from.

That last point matters.

When what makes a business special exists primarily in a founder’s head, a marketer’s instincts or a salesperson’s relationships, much of that value remains dependent on those individuals. Codify it and something changes. People can join the business and understand what the brand stands for. Product developers have a framework for innovation. Marketers and agencies have something to create from. Sales teams have a stronger story to take to retailers.

The brand can become bigger than any one person behind it. That’s an important part of building an enduring brand asset. But a strategy – what we like to call the logic – sitting in a document isn’t enough. Then the creative has to make you feel it. That’s the magic.

This is where specialist creative expertise matters. Great creative is much more than style or decoration. It makes intangible brand thinking tangible — something people can see, recognise and remember — while creating distinctive, ownable assets. B&B did exactly that with Little Bellies, creating a visual world that could make the brand feel different before a consumer had read a single claim. Joy. Naturalness. Reassurance. Personality. A sense that this was a brand created specifically around a child’s natural development.

And getting there wasn’t instantaneous. There were months of back and forth and refinement. The character. Typography. Use of space. Exact Pantone colours. The relationship between product and ingredient photography. Even the seemingly impossible balance of snacks with pieces of fruit and ingredients perched alongside them. All that detail eventually added up to something that looked effortless on shelf.

What you see on shelf is the answer. What you don’t see are the hundreds of hours it took to find it.

And the answer wasn’t arbitrary. Those creative choices were developed specifically to express what was distinctive about Little Bellies. The design was the visible expression of something deeper.

Which brings us to Aldi

This distinction matters when looking at the recent copyright decision. The court case is about particular packaging artworks. It isn’t a finding that Aldi infringed Little Bellies’ strategy, philosophy or broader brand. But those artworks didn’t exist in isolation either.

They emerged from the strategy, founder beliefs and commercial ambition behind Little Bellies – and from the specialist creative work required to turn all of that into an original expression consumers could recognise and feel.

Evidence in the proceedings also showed that Little Bellies had been identified as a “benchmark” during the development of Aldi’s Mamia snacking range. So while the legal question is about copyright in particular creative works, from a brand-building perspective it puts a spotlight on something businesses can easily underestimate:

Original creative work has value. Time, money, expertise and judgement went into creating those works. They weren’t simply decoration added to a product at the end of a process. They were deliberately created assets doing a commercial job for the brand.

Little Bellies invested in creating them. And credit to Clive and Steven Sher for being prepared to protect that investment.

But the design was only one part of the asset

This is where the story gets more interesting for me. The court case puts a spotlight on the value of particular creative works. But those works were one visible manifestation of a much broader investment in building Little Bellies. The brand system gave the business something it could continue building from.

It helped guide innovation and portfolio decisions. It built consumer recognition. It strengthened the brand’s influence with retailers. And it created a coherent platform capable of travelling into other markets. Because the thinking had been codified, its value wasn’t dependent on the same people remaining around the table forever.

The commercial impact followed. In the three years following the rebrand, value sales grew 262%, market share grew 169%, and Little Bellies gained 3,000 additional Australian distribution points. The portfolio grew from eight to 26 SKUs, while the strength of the brand supported premium pricing on new products. The work went on to win Gold at the 2022 DBA Design Effectiveness Awards in London — awards specifically recognising the impact of design on business performance.

These are historical results rather than a measure of where the business sits today. But they provide unusually tangible evidence of what the investment helped unlock.

And the brand travelled.

Following the rebrand, Little Bellies expanded into North America, securing listings in 6,000 stores. More recently, the brand announced a nationwide launch into Kroger stores in the US in 2025. That’s particularly satisfying given that international potential had been part of the ambition behind the work all those years ago. The numbers matter because they show that the investment wasn’t simply producing something beautiful.

It was creating business value.

And that value wasn’t only sitting in sales. It was accumulating in the brand itself – in consumer recognition, retailer influence, distinctive creative assets, organisational knowledge and a system the business could continue building from. That’s the compounding power of brand: investment made at one point in time can create an asset capable of generating value long after the original work is finished.

So what does it mean to treat brand like an asset?

The Little Bellies story provides a pretty good example of what that means in practice.

It means investing properly in understanding what is genuinely valuable and distinctive about a business.

Getting knowledge and belief out of founders’ heads and turning it into something an organisation can use.

Making commercial choices about where the brand can win.

Bringing in specialist creative expertise to turn those ideas into something people can recognise, remember and – importantly – feel.

And then continuing to build from it, rather than treating the brand as something to periodically redesign.

That’s why the Aldi decision feels like such an interesting bookend to work that began nearly a decade ago.

Protection from private label was one objective in the original brief. But the bigger ambition was always to create something distinctive and genuinely ownable in the first place.

Little Bellies invested in building the brand. The business kept building value from it. And years later, when particular creative works arising from that investment were found to have been infringed, the owners were prepared to protect them.

That’s the real lesson: treat brand like the asset it is.

Invest properly in creating it. Keep building value from it. Manage it carefully. And, when necessary, protect it.

Georgie Scott, Partner,  founder + future