Cloth Diapers Try Pinning Down a Comeback

They have a motto at Dy-Dee Diaper Service: “Would you wear paper underwear?”

And, according to Dy-Dee owner Brian O’Neil, a second-generation diaper serviceman, the question reflects more than wishful thinking. In the last two months, O’Neil said, “We’ve increased 200 customers. It was kind of flat before that.” From a low point in 1974, he added, “Over the long haul, we’ve gone up quite a lot.”

Making a Comeback

Real diapers, genuine cloth, making a comeback in this age of instants and disposables? Absolutely, concurred Brent Farber, administrative secretary of the Philadelphia-based National Assn. of Diaper Services. Not only are they more ecologically sound, he noted, but “You never have to worry about going to the store.”

It may, however, be a modest comeback. A query to the Santa Monica office of a prominent pediatrician drew an incredulous response from the front office: “We haven’t seen a cloth diaper in years!”

And in Cincinnati, a spokeswoman at corporate offices of Procter and Gamble, whose Pampers and Luvs brands combined account for half of the $2.7 billion in U.S. sales of disposable diapers annually, said the market is growing steadily and “we project it will continue to increase.”

In 1961, when Pampers were introduced, she noted, disposables accounted for only 1% of all “diaper changes,” a total retail business of $2.5 million. By 1975, that market had grown to $750 million and disposables accounted for 50% of diaper changes. Today, she said, disposables make up 75% of the U.S. diaper market.

The 25% who have chosen to swaddle their babies in real cotton diapers that require pinning and washing apparently have done so for one of two reasons: Diaper rash or concern for the environment.

Others among the ecologically minded admit that they feel they shouldn’t be using the disposables but find them irresistibly easy. Ann JaCoby-Willens, a working mother of two sons, 2 1/2 and 1, spoke of one friend who insists on using cloth diapers because she’s convinced that “somewhere in the world there’s an island where all the Pampers are being kept. She doesn’t want to contribute to the Pampers island.”

JaCoby-Willens says that she herself assuages any guilt feelings about the environment in her own way: “I buy those recyclable greeting cards.”

Thirty years ago Brian O’Neil, president of Dy-Dee, joined the business started by his father in 1938. Where there were about a dozen competitors serving Los Angeles and Orange counties then, he said, today there are only two, Dy-Dee and Sheckley-ABC, each of which has bought out other competitors through the years.

Even so, O’Neil said, “Diaper services haven’t been affected too badly by paper diapers. They’ve mostly stopped us from growing faster.” (A month, or two, or three of diaper service is still a well-received shower gift for a mother-to-be, even if she later switches to disposables.)

In 1974, he said, “We had 1,800 customers at our Pasadena location and 1,000 in Orange. Now we have 5,200 in Pasadena and in Orange there are 3,800. We’ve bought a couple of other services out since.” (Sheckley-ABC, affiliated with a national company and encompassing Tidy Didy, is larger.)

At $9.30 a week for 90 diapers (the number used by the average baby)--deliveries are offered twice weekly--cloth diapers are more economical than disposables, O’Neil pointed out. Because disposables are more absorbent, fewer changes are required, but the total weekly cost is apt to be several dollars higher.

And, as one satisfied Dy-Dee mother pointed out, cloth diapers “make great dust cloths. I keep one in my car to do the windshield. You can’t do that with a disposable.” (Before signing up, she asked what happened to the worn-out diapers and was pleased to learn that they are recycled as rags.)

O’Neil acknowledges: “One of the problems we’ve had is the absorbency. Paper diapers were more absorbent. Now we’ve finally gotten some manufacturers to make thicker, more absorbent diapers.” But some things haven’t changed: The diapers are still delivered in a rectangular pre-fold and they still require pins. “They tried to invent Velcro fasteners,” O’Neil said, “but they just won’t hold up with washing.”

Dy-Dee makes it a point of telling the germ-conscious that each customer’s diapers are kept separate during laundering, enclosed in a net washing bag fastened with an identifying pin. One advantage of this, O’Neil noted, is “if you throw in a T-shirt by mistake, you get it back.”

To stay in business, O’Neil said, diaper services “have to get the word out” and, to that end, Dy-Dee each month sends out 30,000 copies of its 60-page newsletter, the Wet Set Gazette, to obstetricians’ offices, hospitals and childbirth educators. There is also a small booklet for fathers, “The New Owner’s Manual,” and Dy-Dee has a lending library of 30 VHS films on childbirth education with just a discreet commercial message at beginning and end. Coming out soon is a booklet in Spanish.

Now that “we can offer a better product, a more absorbent product,” O’Neil said, “we’re going to be in business for a long, long time.”

“We don’t attempt to compete with paper diapers when it comes to vacations,” the national association’s Farber acknowledged. “People are going to take paper diapers with them.” (Although one woman observed that most paper diapers available in Europe are “horrible.”)

Farber, who for 27 years owned a family laundry, dry cleaning and diaper service, was half-convinced, when he joined the association as administrative secretary in 1970, that diaper services were going to follow family laundries “down the drain.” (He noted that, with the popularity of wash-and-wear fabrics, the number of family laundries in Philadelphia dwindled from 63 in 1946 to one in 1986.)

But in the last 15 years, Farber said, diaper services have started to fight back with advertising campaigns of their own to counter massive campaigns by Procter and Gamble and other manufacturers of disposables. And, as the years went by, he said, “We had a lot of things going for us. Ecology was one of the big ones. And the price of paper went up. To pay for paper diapers is just not part of a lot of budgets today.”

At one time the association, which regulates standards and gave its 1985 top award to Los Angeles’ Dy-Dee, had about 200 member firms but by 1978 “through acquisitions and failures,” Farber said, membership dipped to about 100. Today, it has climbed back to 110. “The cloth diaper service business is back--and doing very well,” he said.

Today, Farber said, the association feels the next competition will come not from disposables but from “the washing machine in the cellar. Believe it or not, that’s the biggest untapped market, the new mother who goes out and buys a couple of dozen diapers and washes them every day. She can’t make them sanitarily clean (as services do) but she thinks it’s good enough” and she thinks it’s cheaper, a notion Farber disputes.

Cited the Statistics

Procter and Gamble’s Kelly Reibling, during a telephone interview, didn’t hesitate to say, “We really don’t see a basis for this story.” She cited the statistics: 16 billion disposable diapers sold annually in this country, sales of $2 billion outside the United States.

(And the number of total consumers has actually shrunk in the last 20 years. In 1965 there were 3,760,000 live births in the United States. By 1970, that figure had dropped to 3,731,000 and in 1983, the last year for which statistics are available, there were 3,614,000).

In January of 1985, Procter and Gamble announced that it was spending $500 million to retool its diaper plants and introduce three versions of new Pampers, a more absorbent, form-fitting diaper with refastenable tape and double elastic leg gathers, and an improved Luvs with a comfort waistband.

“Mothers have responded with great enthusiasm,” Reibling noted, citing sales figures showing that Pampers’ and Luvs’ share of the disposable market had climbed 25%-30%.

Nevertheless, Corky Harvey, who with partner Wendy Haldeman teaches baby-care classes through Santa Monica Hospital’s Birthplace, confirmed that “a lot of people are giving cloth real heavy thought and are giving it a shot.”

The biggest stumbling block, she said, appears to be that new parents “just don’t like messing with pins, especially men. We encourage people that pins are easiest of all. Once you’ve done it 12 times in the first day, you’re a master anyway.”

About half of her students, she has observed, “will really struggle and work with the pins” and may decide to use a diaper service. Recently, baby products companies have come out with products (among these, Bio Bottoms) similar to the wool “soakers” used by mothers in pre-plastics days. These are washable wool felt diaper covers with Velcro closings that hold diapers in place without pinning and are more “breathable” than plastic pants.

Harvey, mother of four, used cloth diapers on her first three children, paper on her youngest. “I hated paper,” she said, “and I was forever running to the store.”

Resurgence of Interest

Several factors have contributed to the resurgence of interest in cloth diapers, Harvey said: “Many babies are rashy and allergic to paper diapers. People don’t tend to change paper as often as they do cloth . . . a lot of the time you can’t tell the baby’s urinated (because disposable diapers draw the moisture in) but the ammonia (a urine component apt to cause irritation) is still there.”

On the other hand, she observed, with so many new mothers working, and delivering their children to day-care centers, disposables are a seemingly carefree alternative to wet diapers to cart home in diaper bags: “They just take a carton down to the baby sitter.”

But, Harvey said, “I can’t imagine that paper all wrapped around my body. . . .”