I guess you're wondering how a corporate girl ended up running a cloth nappy business. It started with a laundry aisle, a pile of 4,000 nappies I couldn't stop picturing, and a promise to try cloth that I almost didn't keep.

In 2017, pregnant with my first baby, my husband suggested cloth nappies. I scoffed. “Will you wash them?!” I was working up to 80 hours a week and had no time for buckets of stinky water and a wooden stick in the corner of the laundry, or so I imagined.

Then a catalogue ad stopped me: each baby uses somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 nappies over about two years. If you're going to use something that many times, shouldn't it be the best version of itself?

I went back to the washing question, properly this time. Clean Cloth Nappies was my saviour, and Designer Bums was the first nappy I could actually figure out how to put back together. We tried disposables for a break after my c-section. We didn't make it past five days.

What I didn't expect was what came after: my phone still serves up memories from those early years, and it's not disposables in the photos. It's tiny works of art. A whole visual diary of our days I didn't know I was building.

A few years on, life had other plans. I went back to work when my second baby turned one, only to find our team was about to be made redundant. Staying in the industry meant contracting, full-time hours again, bleeding into evenings and weekends in a way that hadn't existed pre-kids.

The last couple of years, I felt my work wasn't lining up with what I actually valued. I wanted to turn all those years of informally helping other parents into something real. I wanted to be genuinely available to my kids

So when my best friend mentioned Designer Bums was for sale, I didn't hesitate. In October 2025, the brand's founder Carla entrusted it to me.  I believe in things made to last, prints you'll be sad to see your youngest grow out of, and pieces that earn their place in your family's story the way ours did.

Thank you for being part of this with me.

Elysia x
Owner, Designer Bums