Although Nielsen officially retired in 2001, he continued to dabble in the beauty industry, occasionally meeting with friends to hear about possible investments. He looked at a couple dozen up-and-coming product lines, but nothing captured his fancy until Mama Mio came along last year. “I’ve worked with 50 or 60 brands in my lifetime, and very rarely do you find a brand that has the four key elements to achieve great success,” he says, ticking off the list: good positioning, effective products, reasonable pricing, and strong and focused management.

According to Nielsen, neither Clinique, Prescriptives, nor even the flagship Estée Lauder line ever had all those elements line up at the outset. But Mama Mio does. “It’s mothers for mothers. Even the name Mama Mio spells out its position exactly,” he says.

Three of the founding mothers of Mama Mio—Sian Sutherland, Tanya Mackay, and Kathy Miller—are longtime friends, now in their forties, who came up with the idea for the company three years ago as they experienced their own changes in skin tone and elasticity through their pregnancies and childbirths. “There were very few products out there for mothers,” says Sutherland. “From the minute you find you’re pregnant all the way to getting your body back afterwards—every mother has these concerns.”

Sutherland had been a serial entrepreneur; Mackay has an advertising background; and Miller was a graphic designer. They recruited Jill Dunk, an American who lives in Los Angeles and has a sales background, as the fourth founding partner. Between the four of them, they had more than 40 years of experience in the beauty industry. With an investment of $1.2 million from South African bank Investec, plus cash from their own pockets, they launched the company in the fall of 2005.

Mama Mio’s products were soon found in exclusive department stores like Harrods and Harvey Nichols in Britain; Fred Segal in the U.S., and other boutiques around the world. The company also created a spa-service program in Ritz-Carlton hotels and Canyon Ranch retreats.

Under the watchful eye of Nielsen (whom the founders call their Big Daddy), the company is now ready to make a big push in the larger, more lucrative U.S. market. Nielsen doesn’t play a day-to-day role in management, but he does consult with the co-founders on a regular basis. Last fall, he helped them recruit Phil Theiss, another former Estée Lauder executive, as a full-time C.O.O. and C.F.O. According to Sutherland, Theiss has helped steer Mama Mio to $3 million in sales this fiscal year, and the company is on track to exceed its forecasts of $7 million for next year and $12 million the year after.

As for 2008, Mama Mio is planning to relaunch its website soon and eventually develop it into a communications channel for pregnant women and new mothers. Next month, the company will begin selling at 50 beauty counters in Canada. And this fall, Sutherland anticipates that it will begin selling at a major department store in the U.S. She won’t say which store it is, but Nielsen hints that it may be Macy’s.

For his part, Nielsen is as confident now about the company’s prospects as he was when he first met with Mama Mio’s co-founders.

“This is the mother of all opportunities,” he quips.