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BABECO PRESS AND PUBLICITY


	Telegraph Newspaper June 2006 Starting out By Wendy Grossman (Filed: 03/06/2006) Sewing up the nappy market 'For me, the passion is local jobs," says Elaine Randall. She is the project manager for Babeco, which makes a range of organic baby products. The enterprise spun out of the Silai For Skills sewing project at Bristol City College and its staff are all women drawn from disadvantaged communities: refugees, people with disabilities or mental illness, victims of abuse. "We create jobs for women who find it hard to find jobs elsewhere," says Randall. "People who have been forgotten by the benefits system or are excluded." She includes herself: a single mother with two children, aged three and eight, she lost most of her hearing during her final degree year. The story begins in 2001, when the sewing group, who met one day a week, received six rolls of organic cotton. They asked themselves, "What could we do to make money and get jobs out of this?" Eventually, they decided on designing a new nappy. They thought it would help them and their children, as well as the community and the environment, and would be relatively easy to manage and manufacture. "We started with 'What do people need and want? What is the most ideal, perfect nappy?'" The key idea was to move on from old terry cloth squares to the high performance of disposables. They began with online, tight-knit communities of what Randall calls "nappy nerds" - website chatrooms where people dissect every detail of nappies: daytime use, night-time use, where to buy, the best way of wearing them. They recruited 170 test groups from these websites and from ads in parenting magazines. Meanwhile, they researched fabrics. "The choice was hit and miss," says Randall. They sampled materials from the US and China, testing them thoroughly: washing, burning, pouring water through them, putting them on babies. The group's best sellers now are organic terry cloth made of bamboo, which Randall says is lightweight and silky. Other innovations include putting polyester fleece on the inside, which is soft against the baby's skin and also draws away moisture into absorbent outer layers. The nappy itself is all one piece; biodegradable liners flush easily. This process took two years. In 2003, the group formalised a structure for the business. They were helped by European and neighbourhood renewal grants totalling £60,000. The next two years were difficult. "Mistakes were made, tensions built, time was wasted," says Randall. In 2005, with all but £10,000 spent, the volunteer board of directors made everyone redundant and advertised for a project manager. Randall, who had previously worked as an adviser to local businesses and had been a development worker on the project, got the job. Her mandate: make it happen. In June 2005, the Babeco website was launched and sales hit £17,000 in 10 months. "It's not much," Randall admits, "but it's real money." Orders have come in from France, Australia, New Zealand and Belgium. Babeco has three contracts pending to make organic knickers for leading organic retailers. The women designed and wrote the Babeco website themselves using their children as models. As Randall says, they could have hired a consultancy, just as they could hire expert machinists to sew the nappies, but the point is learning by doing it themselves. In December, Babeco was awarded funding for two years of £100,000 from the Big Lottery Fund's Community Recycling and Economic Development programme. This money will support outreach workers and help launch a laundry service and subsidise it for inner-city and low-income customers, to eliminate the excuses for using disposables. Randall thinks the business will always require some subsidies. "If I'm realistic, the way we have chosen to work is expensive," she says. "But if that means we can succeed in making a difference, that's not a negative." Besides, she says, "If we are moving people off benefits and diverting tonnage out of landfill, we must be saving money somewhere along the line. There's no reward for that." Click here to download Click here to download \| Payments & Postage \| Our Partners \| Useful Links \| Press \| \| Return Home \| Gift Ideas \| Shaped Nappies \| Flat Nappies \| Nappy Accessories \| Little Helpers \| Buy Fabrics \| Sale Stock \| Contact Us \| About Us \|