We’d been making funny onesies at Wrybaby since we created the category in 2000. When things blew up during the first year, they blew up big. Our designs were featured in the NY Times, Newsweek, People, USA Today, Time, and TV Guide, to name a few pubs. They were even seen on VH1, Today Show, and Live with Regis and Kelly. It’s still unconfirmed, but witnesses swear to seeing David Letterman hold up the funny onesie we sent him on his Late Night comedy show. That kind of exposure is great, but it also creates a giant, burning-man-style beacon that screams, THESE PEOPLE ARE ON TO SOMETHING.
Meet Valencia. She’s rocking the world’s first Super Snapsuit.
If you’re a designer or an entrepreneur, you need to hear the very first thing our very first screen printer told us before things got crazy –“People will rip you off. Stay ahead of them.” He wasn’t lyin’. It wasn’t long before we were inundated with competitors, knock-offs, rip-offs, or all three at once. While Von Maur, Buy Buy Baby, and FAO Schwartz were ordering our funny onesies from the source (us!), Target and Sears were ripping us off wholesale. While our company was doing private label projects with Barneys and Cost Plus World Market, thousands of small businesses were stealing our designs right and left. Café Press was full of people hawking wrybaby designs. When the company started, there was just one little place in the south that offered blank onesies to print on. Eventually we started having garments custom made overseas (way better cotton and fit), and while we did that, garment supply companies started carrying lots of blank onesies domestically. It got really easy for people to do what we were doing, so we decided to go back to making baby things that were hard to make.
Our concepts and designs up top, and below is how Target ripped us off. I appreciate that they doubled the cost of a “Photo with Baby” while undercutting the cost of our original onesie by 75%.
We made fun bath towel sets (that’s what we ended up doing with World Market), we made travel cases for pacifiers, and we made stacking blocks for toddlers among many, many other things. We even made pillowcase covers for new parents! All of these did fine, but nothing ever matched the baby-shower-gift perfectness of the funny onesie. It’s a magical combination of being a product for a very focused age range, that’s useful, provides good theater at a baby shower, and is really affordable. So how would we keep making funny onesies that could be recognized as OUR funny onesies?
In 2007 no one was as bananas for super heroes as they are today. Seriously. Just like there were NO funny onesies in 2000 before wrybaby made them. There were only a couple of people making super hero capes for 8 year-olds, which you’d think would be amazing business. It wasn’t. The problem was this – no one wanted to kill a kid with a cape they made, and no one wanted their kid to die in one. It’s pretty understandable from a parent’s perspective. And, yeah, it’s freaking scary making kids clothes much less SUPER kids clothes. We figured these added up to a pretty HUGE barrier to entry that we could rub our brains on and solve.
OK, nevermind for a sec that they were hard to make. If no one were ape shit for comic book heroes, why would anyone want to buy a super hero onesie? The short answer is because it’s ridiculously hilarious. Look, you’ve got this non-communicative blob who doesn’t even have enough strength to hold its own head up, much less fight a giant menace from planet Krapnoid. Can you imagine strolling a super-infant into a Starbucks? Knee. Slapping. Hilarious. You could even have fun over a bottle of wine with your spouse imagining your child’s future super-powers. There were all kinds of reasons to take on the how-do-we-not-kill-the-child-problem. The answer was surprisingly simple and available all along. It was just hard to make. Take a standard, lap-shoulder baby t-shirt and sew a cape into the shoulder seams. The neck would be SUPER loose. And a baby 0-12 months isn’t THAT squiggly, so as long as you made the cape short enough to not get sat on, you’d be good. As an extra safety precaution we tacked the cape down to the back of the bodysuit in three places, which kept it nice and close. Then, to make it even harder to replicate, we used this cool puffy ink to print on the front.
The idea for a Super Onesie actually came from the baby journal we wrote for Running Press, The New Parent’s Fun Book (left). You can see where we incorporated the cape into the shoulder seams. And although a baby’s going to do nothing but lay on it, we even did the extra credit of embroidering a star on the cape!
How fun is that puffy ink!? I made it so only some parts were puffy. Like on Super Cute, only the type outline and starts were puffy so the design didn’t get to heavy. Who wants a sweaty baby?
Aside from the darn thing being SUPER safe to wear, there were so many other minut details that we poured over to make this garment from scratch. From fit to color to a cape that wouldn’t end up a wrinkled mess. What a pain!
NPH!!!!!!! I couldn’t believe I was lucky enough to have even the smallest guest appearance in his awesome life. The Super Snapsuits were SUPER well received (sorry, I’ll stop doing that now). For a while they were, at least.
The packaging was on point and the pitch was perfect. When all was said and done we had a SUPER safe, SUPER fun new baby shower gift to offer our boutiques. We eventually added a new Super Snapsuit to the mix – “Super Bad” for kids that may desire a different path to worldwide notoriety. Our invention made it to People.com, but our pride and joy was when Neil Patrick Harris showed pics of his twins wearing them while he was co-hosting Live with Regis and Kelly. Another point of pride was when Ohio State University asked us to donate Super Snapsuits to help reward families who were participating in a study to battle SMA (Spinal Muscular Atrophy). No one bothered trying to copy our Super Snapuits. And most importantly, no one got hurt. Total win. At least until the super hero craze started. Which you’d think would HELP our sales, but it did not. The opposite happened! Consumers wanted licensed product, no matter how shitty that product was constructed. And, man, they were terrible. They didn’t even have capes, for crying out loud! But that’s people. Sigh. Eventually our Super Snapsuits were attacked online nationally as an affront to women somehow. So when we sold out of our last batch, we retired the style for the time being.
We did so well with those first two styles, we decided to add a villain to the mix. Initially these came locked away in little window box packaging, which in hindsight was kind of dumb because you couldn’t see the cape right away.
We also made everything so bigger kids could be super, too.
That sounds like a sad ending, but it’s totally not! This story is titled “HOW TO BE FIRST”, after all! Hahaha. While the Super Snapsuits were on the market, we were still innovating. A onesie with just a QR code on the front, for example. When the curious scanned it, it would bring up a fake online shopping website saying that that baby had been added to their cart. We invented a baby mystic who offered blind-boxed fortune telling baby t-shirts (you wouldn’t know which incredible future you’d get!). We’re still innovating. You can get free, shareable goodies every month, or you can print our styles on your own with services like Zazzle. This is how, for more than 20 years, wrybaby has stayed profitable. By being first.
DAVE SOPP – Creative
Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com
