Designing a cloth nappy

Designing a cloth nappy take a lot of time, effort and testing. As part of our tenth anniversary, I thought I’d share the story of our pocket nappy, the Dinky nappy.

The early days

Back when my oldest son was only one, I had been using cloth nappies on him for a while. I decided, being as I was fairly handy with a sewing machine, to try my hand at making my own. At that stage, I wasn’t ready to try designing a cloth nappy, so I stuck to the patterns that I could find online.

Early days in the dinky nappy design process, a young boy in an orange cloth nappy

Over time, I experimented with different fabrics and different designs. I tried lots of different brands that were on the market. All the time, I was looking at the features that seemed to work well and that I wanted to incorporate in my ideal nappy.

An early woollen nappy cover on my son, early cloth nappy designs.

Designing the dinky nappy

When I first set up Nappyneedz back in 2010, I was making nearly all of the products that we sold. The first cloth nappies that I had were quite basic. But this soon evolved into the dinky nappy. This combined lots of the features that I had liked in my testing phases. Although some of these were things I had come across in other brands, others were brand new and unique to the dinky. These features are:

  • Deep leg gussets to help stop leaks and for a better fit around the legs.
  • Wide pocket for easy stuffing.
  • Extra elastic around the back.
  • Rise snaps to make the nappy fit for longer and grow with your baby.
  • Rear size snaps, to make the nappy snap-down extra small for newborn babies.
  • A stay dry suede cloth inner.
  • Bamboo fleece and microfibre trifold insert for maximum absorbency but quicker drying with no compression leaks.
  • A double row of snaps at the waist for a better fit and stop wing droop.
Features of the dinky cloth nappy design.

New nappy plans

Our dinky nappy design has been around for a while now and it’s one that lots of parents love. We’ve also got some new nappies in the pipeline. We’ve recently introduced an extra large dinky nappy. We have more on the way, with a couple of new nappies planned for the new year.

If you’d like to try anything from our range, then don’t forget that for the whole of November you can get 15% off with the code ywzff2yt at checkout. Happy tenth birthday to us.

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