Cory’s been ready to move up to medium-sized diapers for the last couple of months. After our not-so-great experience with the small Fuzzi Bunz, I hunted around for a different brand to buy in the next size. I read a bunch more reviews and settled on Green Acre Designs (or GADs, in the hip mom-ese). I ordered a few.
The GADs were generally well-made, except that the stitching immediately started coming out on the hemp inserts. That was annoying, but didn’t break them. Reviewers like the GADs because they fit nicely and are stitched with the soft inside rolled out at the edges so that the elastic doesn’t leave red marks on their baby’s legs. And it doesn’t… however it also didn’t keep the pee, no matter how small the amount, from wicking straight out and into the bottom half of Cory’s shirt. I also found that inserts (I tried a few different ones) tend to bunch up in them more than they did in the Fuzzi Bunz.
I didn’t really find any other ones that I wanted to try, and in the meantime Mother of Eden announced that they were releasing a new version of the Fuzzi Bunz diapers, which would again be made in the US. We decided to try them again since it sounded like they were intending to address their reliability issues, and really, the ones that didn’t break within the first two months have worked really well and stood up to a lot of hard use.
It was pretty hard to get them – medium is the most popular size, and there were a couple of months where you couldn’t get either the old style (which we didn’t want anyway) OR the new style, so demand was building up. The merchants put the old style on clearance, which sold them out quickly, then didn’t receive their new stock for several weeks. I also found that some merchants are a little dodgy about telling you what they actually have before you place an order. In the end I had to watch Google to see which vendors had taken out ads to announce that they had new ones in stock, then run and see if you could tell whether or not they still did. (We ended up ordering from Wildflower Diapers and didn’t have any trouble with them.)
Anyway, we finally have the medium-size diapers. We’ve only had them a couple of weeks, but so far so good. I haven’t seen any loose threads or sizing problems – the quality seems to be much more consistent than it was with the ones made in Mexico. I should note that the insert is made in China. Still, at least it comes with the diaper – with GADs, as well as some others, you have to order the insert separately and it pushes the price up another $5 or so higher than it first appears.
We’ll see if FBs have been fixed. I suspect they had moved production to Mexico because so many more brands of all-in-ones have come out, and they thought they would have to undersell their new competitors to keep their business. At least they were smart enough to switch back before they killed their brand.