Last week I was on a family holiday in Hunstanton in North Norfolk. We had a great time at this traditional seaside town and we loved having a bit of down time. On our last day there I was taking our dog on her final beach walk before heading back home and thought I’d have a quick check on our Hangout and see if I’d missed anything exciting whilst I’d been away…. and then I saw all these wonderful comments about our new extenders. So I thought I’d write to tell you the tale of how they came about.
It started in the summer of 2020, those hazy days of homeschooling, PE with Joe and Saturday night ‘pub’ quizzes held over Zoom. I had been working in between year 3 & 5 reading comprehension & maths, planting seeds and dying hair with tissue paper and I was absolutely shattered.
We all used to take turns to go into the office so that we didn’t cross over. As my husband was working throughout lockdowns, I chose to go into the office in the evenings. I’d sit there with my tunes on and work my way through all the messages that we were getting and there were A LOT!
Don’t get me wrong, I loved going into the office, it was my place of peace and solitude, I absolutely love being around people but with those strange times we were living through, being with the same people day in day out for months meant that things were getting a little fractious. The office gave me a place to breathe, to think and to just be Sue, not mum, head chef, cleaner, teacher or hairdresser, just me.
I’d had a feeling from the messages that we were getting that either nappies were getting smaller (they weren’t) or babies were getting bigger as I was seeing more and more enquiries coming through asking for help with fit as the nappies were too small for their not yet potty trained child. So I took to some old nappies with a pair of scissors and wondered if we could find a simple solution.
I know Eve has shared the beginnings of her print designs before now. How they look in their infancy sometimes seems a world away from the finished product once the brilliant artists and designers have got their hands on them.
These images show stills from the video I sent to Eve one night. I had a play with some preloved nappies and our popper tool. So you can see from the photos below how the extenders started out life....and you can also see how frazzled I was
It took a while for us to get a robust design because we were all still working remotely. But we did and we found some lovely customers who were willing to test them and give us feedback - and they didn’t hold back which is exactly what we needed! Some tweaks were made and voila - you now have the extenders you saw last week.
Your lovely comments really made me stop in my tracks when I was walking to the beach on that last day of our holiday. I am so happy that they have been well received and will help lots of you stay with your reusables for that little bit longer, hopefully for as long as you need them to.
Do keep giving the feedback though and like our initial group of testers - don’t hold back!
You can see our nappy extenders here.