Designing Baby Blankets

For many years I have worked for a company that sells baby blankets.  The design of the blanket is unique as it fits inside buggies and car seats and wraps round.  It has been a very successful product and we have never had any cause to redesign it for any reason.  But the one thing that does constantly change is the colours and designs; we have to keep them fresh, new and current.  If they stay the same for too long, they become stale and customers who regularly visit the site get bored with the same choices.

We are constantly looking at other baby products to keep up to date with the latest fashions and trends.  We also try to match colours so that people can buy a baby blanket as an accessory to items they already have.

Plain colours are reasonably easy to change as you just order the right colour and make up the products.  Patterns are a bit more difficult because you can order ready printed patterns, but of course so can other people which means there is a danger that other products that come on to the market which the same design.  The best way to avoid this is to design your own fabric, but this can be costly and time consuming.  There is also the dilemma of designing something that will be in fashion but will not suddenly become dated.  You have to remember that people only buy a baby blanket once or twice, within a few months you are on to a completely new market as a new batch of babies are born.  They expect the designs and colours to be current.

I think many customers don’t realise what a huge investment and complication it is to design new baby blankets for a small company.  They are used to large high street chains who a constantly investing and changing their products. 

The other thing that we have to do is introduce new products, so that is always something new and interesting for our customers.  As we aim to be less fuss more fun, all of our products have to designed in that vein, we need products that are unique so that they are something that can’t be found anywhere else, or at least the design needs to be unique and better than other similar products.

The great thing about baby blankets and the baby market is that is it generally always needed as people always have babies even in economic downtimes.  You find that if people are on a limited budget they are still happy to spend on their children and they tend to cut down on other areas.

The next few times you go shopping, have a look in a shop window and see how often the display changes, you will find that it may be once or twice a week to keep it fresh,  you have probably never noticed before, but it’s all going on behind the scenes.