This Indian IBM exec quit her job to bring you eco-friendly cloth diapers

The special padding inside does the trick, reports Tech in Asia

Just how much pee and poop a cute little baby can unleash is unbelievable. I discovered it the hard way.

I’d sworn to use cloth nappies with my firstborn, as I absolutely wasn’t going to throw six diapers a day into the dustbin and look the other way while they took 500 years to decompose. 

Nobody had told me about “cloth diapers” then. No one until Anuradha Rao, that is.

Battling a dilemma similar to mine, the former IBM executive decided to do something about it. A year ago, she founded Bumpadum, a small start-up in Bengaluru that makes and supplies adorable printed cloth diapers for children online.

Her firm has sold 1,200 of them since July last year and claims to be growing 20 per cent month-on-month. “If you exclude my salary, we are a profitable business,” Anuradha tells Tech in Asia. The start-up sells with the help of social media – Amazon, Instagram, and Facebook, besides its own website.

Each Bumpadum diaper costs around $14.9. But here’s why shelling out that amount on a single diaper isn’t as crazy as it sounds. 

Do cloth diapers really work?

The special padding inside does the trick, but it requires some prepping — the more it is washed, the better the absorption.

“We use micro-fleece and hemp in the padding,” says Anuradha. “Micro-fleece absorbs moisture immediately,” she explains, “but since the quality available in India is not good, we import it from China.” The other important raw material is cotton, which is sourced from India itself.

The diapers come with inserts (extra padding) for additional protection. This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here