She quit her IBM job to found a diaper company

Bumpadum founder Anuradha Rao.

Just how much pee and poop a cute little baby can unleash is unbelievable. I discovered it the hard way.

I’d sworn to use cloth nappies with my firstborn, as I absolutely wasn’t going to throw six diapers a day into the dustbin and look the other way while they took 500 years to decompose. Plus those thick, mountainous layers could leave a bad skin rash in the tropical heat of Delhi.

But trying to be eco-friendly almost took my sanity away.

I was cleaning her, changing the soiled bed linen, washing nappies (made of plain cotton cloth), and never getting more than two hours of sleep at a stretch because the little one would start crying at the slightest hint of wetness.

Naturally, when my second kid was born four years ago, I took to disposable diapers like bees to honey.

Nobody had told me about “cloth diapers” then. Yes, things that combine the convenience of a diaper with the environment-friendliness of cloth do exist, but apparently no one thought of making it in a country that has forever tied cloth around the loins of its babies.

No one until Anuradha Rao, that is.

Battling a dilemma similar to mine, the former IBM executive decided to do something about it. A year ago, she founded Bumpadum, a small startup in Bangalore that makes and supplies adorable printed cloth diapers for children online.

“We are the only cloth diaper company that manufactures in India, though there are a few brands that import from China and sell here,” says Anuradha, an alumna of the Yale School of Management and mother to a two-and-a-half-year-old girl.

Her firm has sold 1,200 of them since July last year and claims to be growing 20 percent month-on-month. “If you exclude my salary, we are a profitable business,” Anuradha tells Tech in Asia. The startup sells with the help of social media – Amazon, Instagram, and Facebook, besides its own website.

Each Bumpadum diaper costs around US$14.9. But here’s why shelling out that amount on a single diaper isn’t as crazy as it sounds.

The conscientious parent

From the age of 0 to 3, a baby goes through 7,000 diapers on an average. So imagine the load a single diaper-clad baby can put on the earth.

The statistics began to weigh heavily on Anuradha. “I was using disposable diapers for my daughter since her birth in 2014. But the quantity of waste generated hit me as she neared a year.”

Do cloth diapers really work?

Poopy business