I know what you mean totally. I get people who haven’t bought from me asking advice and I always help and even then but not very often they go somewhere else!

What it comes down to with selling nappies is whether you see it as a business or hobby. I see it as a business – but I know even though I sell alot that I will need to rely on my distributorship business which I am busy building or teaching to actually make money.

I don’t think this is made clear to people/advisors that this business is hard work for little gain! or that you have to be good at what you do to make money.

I mean, even when the advice is free, there are people who ask for it and by the time you talk to them a day or two later, they have already rushed off and bought some “amazing deal” somewhere. Some people just won’t be helped.

Sadly people getting advice then buying online has been happening for years – its nothing new. This has been talked over and over with Lollipop Advisors – who would have seen the NappyLady/Twinkle as doing exactly the same thing. But I have never been phased by it and I know people buy from me because they trust my advice – and I would expect people to do the same for whatever company – but sadly, people do want as cheap as possible at the moment and some conscience has been eroded by the recesssion.

I try to keep my prices at RRP simply because it doesn’t erode my margin and then at appropriate times I can afford to do offers or have sales etc – but if my prices were constantly low, I can put my hand on my heart and say I would probably run at a loss.

The way I see it is approx 10% of the population use cloth nappies – and there are hundreds of cloth nappy shops/wahms/websites all in competition for this tiny niche in the population. The plain fact is there simply aren’t enough customers for everyone to run a successful business – and the ones with less experience, who don’t offer advice etc – who may have lower prices, will in my prediction, be the ones who fail.

I know other big companies who feel excatly the same as you do and wonder why on earth they do it – not great inspiration for the new ones or little companies at all.

I think lots of people think the manufacturers make loads of money – like totsbots, Lollipop etc – they don’t – even Mr BM must be twitching his toes atm. Yet if you look on CNT – the wahms are booming – not mainstream market but sales within the existing nappy community from what I can tell.

Potential users – parents to be – nurseries – hospitals – I see the need for educating people – which I do through the nappy network – but when push comes to shove, you need to sell something to survive!

While I do shop around when it comes to buying new cloth, price has never been the only consideration, or rather the price of the individual nappy. I’m more likely to spend money at one paricular retailer if the overall cost including postage is good and if I can get everything I want at the one place (so I don’t pay multiple postal charges) which means that I do often use the slightly larger retailers as they have a better range. But service and reliability is also pretty important. This goes for other types of web purchase too – after losing money when two left feet went bust I would now spend a little more but buy from a retailer that will answer my phone calls, actually deliver and will provide good after sales service when issues arise. So long as the products are competitively priced I’d rather go with reliability.

I don’t know if there is anything you can do about those that take free advice and then buy from others but I would assume it’s people new to cloth nappying as those of us with more long term addictions wouldn’t be looking to buy a complete set and are more likely to be buying something for reasons other than performance etc.

Anyway, I don’t know if any of this helps. I really hope you don’t go out of business. I was saddened to see decent cloth nappy brands being discountinued at large retailers in favour of rubbish ones with great marketing campaigns (tots bots at babys’r'us for eg) and I would really love for cloth to be able to stop being a niche product.

Good luck!

Jemma I do know what you mean about the challenging bit of getting those bags back out of the house and into the car. By magic. Without relying on my own faulty human memory.

It is certainly true that the world becoming vegetarian would be wholy unsustainable – for a start it’s very difficult to farm/ garden organically over the long term without animal input in terms of manure and soil health (as far as I understand).

Interestingly in Wiltshire we don’t yet have food waste collection – here the council officers have watched how other councils who do it have got on – and one of the most surprising outcomes has been a reduciton in food waste! People are more aware of what they are wasting when it’s being collected in one place once a fortnight and thus behaviour is changing. Great – but tricky if your waste reduction plan relies on people’s behaviour staying predictable!

In terms of plastic bags, I can’t believe there’s a household in the country that hasn’t got a significant collection of reusable bags in organic or unbleached or fairly traded cotton, not to mention the Bookstart bags and Bags for Life. The real trick is to get them out of the house again and back into the car….

Thank you for the URL – that looks really interesting. I’ll pass it on to Belinda, if she hasn’t already seen it.

Interestingly, your first comment appeared straight in the blog, without needing approval. Yet your second needed approval. I’m not sure I understand how wordpress works!!