How We Lose Money and Why We're Okay With It

We used to do more than a million dollars a year with a single well-known brand. We do less than half that now, and it was my decision.

Here's what happened. A premium brand we'd carried for years released the newest version of what was, at the time, our single best-selling car seat. Same model, next generation, the kind of update that's usually a good day for a retailer. So we did what we do with everything: we asked the manufacturer to tell us, in writing, what was in it. The fabric came back fire-retardant free. The foam did not.

We refused to stock it.

I knew that seat was an anchor. Parents chose it first and then built everything else around it: the stroller it clicked into, the adapters, the second base for the second car, the bassinet, the bag. Lose the anchor and you don't just lose a sale. You lose the customer, who goes and buys the whole system somewhere else.

I signed off on that knowing exactly what it would cost us. I would do it again today.

Let me say the part most retailers only imply. We would rather lose the money than knowingly put a baby in contact with something toxic. That isn't a slogan on our About page. It's a cost of business, and I've watched it come out of our revenue for years. (The chart above shows our actual decline in sales for this brand.) 

Think about a crib mattress. Your child will spend more hours asleep on that one surface than on anything else they will ever own. If I can't tell you what's in it, I have no business selling it to you. That's my approach, and it's why we wrote an entire guide to choosing an organic crib mattress instead of just telling you ours are nice.

There's an easier version of this business than the one I run. In it, a brand emails us a line sheet, we like the margins, we add SKUs to our site, and we let their marketing descriptions do the talking. Plenty of stores work that way, and I understand why. I never could, because I have three kids and I know what it's like to see some new study come out and to question whether the products your baby is exposed to are actually safe enough.

So we set our own standard for what we'll sell, and we never looked back.

What we ask every brand

In practice, that standard is a form of our own design: twenty-two questions, answered by the manufacturer, for every single product before we'll list it.

We built it because of rampant greenwashing. Walk any baby aisle and you'll see products with "clean," "pure," and "natural" on them, but what do those really mean? Two crib mattresses can wear the same soothing language and be entirely different objects underneath. When you see something has “organic” in the title, it’s a great start, but which part(s) of the item are actually organic? The truth may surprise you.

So we stopped reading tags and started sending the form. Not one form per brand. One per product. If a crib comes in three finishes, that's three sets of answers, because the finish or fabric is where things can change. If a brand sells us nine items, we want nine forms, and we have chased manufacturers across time zones for the last one.

Twelve of the questions cover the certifications you already shop by, the GREENGUARD Golds and OEKO-TEXs and GOTSs of the world. The rest are more blunt, and they're the ones I would otherwise lose sleep over:

• Does this item contain formaldehyde?
• Does it contain any known harmful phthalates?
• Does it contain PFAS?
• Is it low-VOC? Low-EMF?
• Is it made from recycled materials? Is it handmade?

Yes, no, or not applicable. From the manufacturer, not from a marketing deck. So when we tell you about a product's non-tox chops, we're reading off an answer somebody high up in product development at that company had to put in writing and not just what their marketing department crafted to sound appealing. See all our certifications.

The two answers that end the conversation: fire retardants and excessive EMFs

Nothing on this site contains chemical fire retardants, in any component, foam included. We ask manufacturers three ways: Did you add them? Could the product have picked them up from a factory floor that uses them? Is it guaranteed free of them? That middle question is the one almost nobody asks. A brand can truthfully say it added nothing and still be assembling your car seat forty feet from a line that sprays the stuff. We'd rather know and tell you, which is why our badges separate genuinely fire-retardant-free from possible trace carryover. You can see that split on our certifications page.

The second gate is electromagnetic fields, and it's the one that surprises people. If a device puts out high EMFs, it doesn't go on the site, and it doesn't stay on the site either. We once threw away an entire pallet of a popular nursery appliance rather than sell it. Not returned to the vendor. Not quietly discounted. Thrown away, at our own expense, because the alternative was letting it into somebody's nursery. We got some hate for it but I will not donate a product to anyone, anywhere, if I don’t consider it safe for babies.

It's also why the only baby monitor you'll find here is the Harbor, out of an entire category we could be selling you. And there's a new product we're onboarding right now that I'm genuinely excited about, but it took years to strike a deal with the manufacturer because we insisted on measuring its EMF ourselves rather than trusting a number someone emailed us. The longer version of that thinking is in our guide to low-EMF baby nurseries.

What we won't pretend

Not every product here is organic, and I won't pretend otherwise. A solid wood crib and an organic cotton swaddle are held to different standards. Some things we carry are GOTS certified, some are FSC, and some are simply well-made furniture that never claims to be anything more.

What I will tell you is exactly which standards each one meets, because we dug for that info, and because you deserve the truth. That's the difference I care about: not perfection, but having standards and talking about them honestly. We have something for everyone, from the most discerning buyer who wants only the purest materials to parents on a very tight budget who need their money to go as far as possible.

Anyone can build a pretty baby gear website, order the popular brands, take pics on a nice rug, and let the photos do the selling. We've spent years doing the unglamorous opposite, digging in, finding out the truth about what’s in the products we sell, because you shouldn't need a chemistry degree to shop for your own kid. Other retailers throw around the word “curation” to mean they have taste. We use that word, too, but for us, it means we have proof.

I still think about that one car seat. Somewhere out there is the version of this company that stocked it, took the million dollars, and never asked what was in the foam. That company is bigger than this one. It also has no idea what's inside anything it sells. Thanks to people like you, who truly care about what the next generation is exposed to, we are able to stay in business and continue to serve you and hopefully encourage our world to be a little less toxic and a little more aware.