Twinkie Tush is a company that makes cloth diapers and other child-focused sewn items. It has grown from a one-woman, stay-at-home-mom show to a 15 employee company with in-house manufacturing, based in Ithaca, New York.
Talking with the owners of Twinkie Tush, Gretchen and Mike, is like talking to a couple of college buddies you’ve lost touch with, but immediately click again, even if it’s been twenty years since you last talked. It’s comfortable, interesting, and heart-warming to hear the love and respect in their voices as they describe the adventure that their business, Twinkie Tush, has been.
The background
Like many entrepreneurs, Mike and Gretchen’s educational background is not directly tied to business or marketing. They both have acting degrees from Ithaca College in upstate New York and spent several years in New York City working to make a successful go of acting.
It was when they got engaged that Mike decided he needed something with the income and stability to support a family. So he took a job in an agency doing event planning and experiential advertising, and the couple moved from New York to New Jersey.
Gretchen, meanwhile, was in full family planning mode. Unfortunately, Gretchen and Mike experienced issues with infertility and, during that time, Gretchen found support in online message boards and forums geared towards women with the same experiences.
The twins arrive
Happily, in 2009, Gretchen and Mike were blessed with twins, a daughter and a son. Little did Gretchen know, at the time, that the twins would eventually inspire a company that has enabled both Gretchen and Mike to support themselves, their families, and their employees.
As Gretchen describes it, when the twins were first born, she was curious about cloth diapering, but not exceptionally driven to try it: “We talked a little bit about cloth diapering before they were born, but we thought it would be too much with twins and we just weren’t totally committed to it.”
Mike chips in: “I mean, I never knew a thing about cloth diapers. So all I saw in my head were white, dirty, washcloths with big safety pins. So I thought, these are my twins, my first children. I’m imagining bludgeoning them and myself with these pins. I just was just terrified. I was thinking, I’ve got enough to think about with twins coming on the way. Never having any kids at all and all of a sudden, twins are coming. And I was definitely not into the idea of cloth diapers because of the fear and the the unknowns about it.”
The problem
The twins were born, and Gretchen stayed at home with them, managing the blur of taking care of two infants at once. However, she ran into a snag — her son was having a terrible skin reaction to disposable diapers: “Our son had a horrible reaction to the disposable diapers and our daughter was fine, but he got blisters from the stay dry crystals or whatever. And I thought, ‘This is awful. I can’t do this.’ So we decided to switch to cloth.”
Gretchen then started on a journey that many cloth diapering parents go through — experimenting with multiple different types of diapers and diapering systems: “We bought a whole stash of diapers that totally didn’t work for us because we didn’t know what we were doing. Then a friend sort of schooled me on diapers and we started using fitteds.” (Fitteds are cloth diapers with elastic and fasteners. They don’t require pins and are as easy to put on a baby as disposable diapers.)
However, Gretchen found that, with the diapers she was using, she couldn’t find the right balance of fit and absorbency. She was trying to find one-sized diapers (diapers that can fit from infancy to toddler-hood), but “I felt like they weren’t big enough. They weren’t truly one size. I felt like we could get plumbers crack.”
There is also a balance that needs to be struck with cloth diapers: if the diapers fit well, they often don’t have enough absorbency. Conversely, if they have a lot of absorbency, they are often so thick, they don’t fit well.
Designing the solution
Gretchen was convinced that she could sew a better diaper than the ones she had been using. Although she didn’t have a formal background as a seamstress, she had always been what she describes as a designer / artsy / crafty person, making jewelry at one point. Thus she never had any doubt she could do better.
There followed a long period of trial and error through the summer of 2010, with Gretchen experimenting with the shape of the diaper, as well as the layers to use for absorbency: “I started playing around. I made a lot of really not at all useful diapers, before I found my way to where I wanted to be… Some of it was just instinct, like in terms of what to put in them, the layers and stuff. That was a long process of trial and error… And, there were certainly a lot of bad attempts along the way.”
When she first started, she was only thinking in terms of finding a solution for her own children. But as she narrowed down to her ideal design, she wanted to be able to buy better materials. She also began to wonder if other parents would appreciate the design she had created. She began to think in terms of making diapers to sell.
The pitch
In order to get the types of materials she wanted, Gretchen would need to order in bulk. She also needed a serger, which is similar to a sewing machine, but specializes in creating a neat, sewn edge that looks professional and won’t unravel. To do all of this, she would need to spend about $1000.
Living on a single income, and with two infants, meant that this was not a trivial amount of money. In order to make it clear what her intention was, Gretchen wrote Mike an email she called “The pitch.” It’s an email she still has to this day.
This is how she describes her proposal: “How would you feel about me spending a thousand dollars to get an inexpensive serger, a bunch of good fabrics, and some elastic — good stuff that I could actually use to make diapers. And I said, ‘I’m going to make a bunch of testers and try them out. And if it works out, then I think this might be something that would enable us to go out to dinner a couple times a month or so. It’d be just a little bit of extra income.'”
Mike was fully supportive, so Gretchen placed the order and started sewing.
Getting started
Over her time at the infertility message boards, Gretchen had built relationships with many of the women online. This community of new mothers became Gretchen’s test market for her prototypes. In the fall of 2010, she began shipping out completed diapers and soliciting feedback on the design: “I developed relationships with a lot of women online, because of message boards surrounding that topic of infertility. And I knew a lot of women, and a lot of them that had babies. So by the time I was making testers, I just went right to these women and said, ‘Do you want to test these?’ and it was very easy to find people who I knew would be honest with me, who I’d known for a long time. So we sent out testers, and they liked them. I changed a couple things based on feedback but not a lot.”
Based on this early feedback, Gretchen refined her designs and, in December of 2010, she launched her store on the Hyena Cart platform, an online marketplace similar to Etsy, but focused on cloth diapers and other eco- and family-friendly products. Gretchen chose the name “Twinkie Tush” in honor of the twins, whom she and Mike affectionately call the “Twinkies.”
At her first few stockings, some things sold, mostly to her online friends. As she says, “…they wanted to support me. They wanted to see me succeed.”
At a time when most work-at-home-mom diaper makers on Hyena Cart were listing 5-6 diapers at a time, Gretchen was listing 30. This abundance in itself made Twinkie Tush stand out. Shoppers began to take notice, and, as they received and tried their diapers, the positive buzz began.
By the third time she listed her weekly production of 30 diapers, she sold out of every one. As more people tried her diapers and word of mouth spread, the demand quickly outstripped what she could produce. As Gretchen recalls, “…the word spread, because word can spread — positive, negative, anything will spread so quickly online and so it spread very, very quickly. And I think a lot of work-at-home-moms can get that early support and excitement about their brand, but they either don’t want to or can’t meet the demand and so it sort of doesn’t go anywhere. Because it takes a lot of work to meet the demand. But I knew like immediately once the call was there I wanted to meet it.”
The at-home sweatshop
Gretchen’s drive to meet the high demand had her cutting, sewing, snapping, shipping, photographing, emailing, and listing diapers at every waking moment when the twins allowed it (usually naptime, playtime when they entertained each other, and nighttime, after they went to bed.)
For roughly 6 months, Gretchen ran the business without outside help, and her and Mike’s household was a manufacturing and shipping facility. In Mike’s words: “it got to the point where every, waking moment was spent working. Our house was a factory. With bins of fabric, bins of diapers…So Gretch and I would do all the shipping in our living room. And it was so funny because our living room would be covered with packages and I would say to her, ‘Someday, there’s going to be a shipping department! And we’re not going to be sitting on our living room floor at 2 in the morning.'”
And, as Gretchen recalls, “I would sew and snap and I had everything set up. We had this relatively small house in New Jersey and I had everything set up in the living room. So I had card tables and I had a chair and I would just sit there and sew. And then I had a snap press that we had mounted to a foot so it was a foot press and I would pull that over and I would watch TV and hang out with Mike, but I would be working the entire time.”
In Gretchen’s words: “I felt like I didn’t have any sense of like boundaries. So I would just work any hours of the day. Like if I woke up at two in the morning with a baby and someone had emailed, I would email them back. I guess it’s funny now, but it’s also completely exhausting.”
One morning, Gretchen woke before the twins, at 4 in the morning, to finish putting snaps on diapers that she wanted to photograph and list that day. In her words, “I was so tired, I snapped my thumb! And I went back upstairs, and I woke Mike up, and I was just sobbing. And he was like, ‘Oh my god, what’d you do?’ And I was like, ‘I snapped my thumb!’ And it was that moment for me, I just remember that was one of the times that I just realized I could not possibly do any more than I was doing, but yet they were yelling at me that there wasn’t enough, you know what I mean?”
Even with Gretchen making and selling 30 diapers a week, demand was not only unsatisfied, it was growing and becoming more and more insistent. It was clear that Gretchen needed help to increase her production rate.
Bringing in help
Just at that moment, in April of 2011, one of Gretchen’s customers emailed her out of the blue asking if she could help in any way. She lived an hour a way and knew Gretchen was having trouble meeting the demand for Twinkie Tush diapers.
After 5 months of running full production on her own, Gretchen finally had help. She put her first helper to work cutting fabric. This first worker was quickly followed by a former co-employee of Gretchen’s who helped installing the first row of snaps, and then Gretchen’s cousin, who helped with installing the final snaps.
This was an assembly line at a distance. None of the women lived particularly close to each other. So Mike was set to work driving bins of partially finished diapers around New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Fabric would go from Gretchen to the cutter, then the cut pieces would travel to Gretchen to be sewn, then driven to the first stage snapper, and then the second stage snapper. Finally, the finished diapers would be delivered back to Gretchen for final quality checks, photography, listing and shipping. Bins were exchanged every two weeks. The turnaround time on a diaper was about 6 weeks: “So what happened was I had these three women helping me and they all had other jobs. They were all essentially doing me a favor and we were obviously paying them, but it wasn’t like they were like, ‘Yes, this is what I want to do with my life.'”
With the extra help, production rose to about 200 diapers per month. This 6 week production line ran along for about a year, from April 2011 to April 2012. However, Gretchen’s and Mike’s house was still overrun with bins of fabric and diapers, sewing equipment, shipping materials and packages. And still, the demand was increasing. Gretchen mentioned to Mike that she wanted to see if her 3 helpers could take on more work.
Unfortunately, this was not to be: “I said to Mike, at some point along the way, I want to see if these women can do more hours so that I can do more diapers. And pretty much immediately after I said that all three of them separately individually came to me and said, ‘I have to scale back.’ And I was in panic mode of like, oh my God. And I remember us like sitting on the couch in New Jersey, in our home. And I said to him, we either need to totally scale back and just do this as a hobby, and I’ll be a regular work at home mom, or we need to expand. I cannot do this.”
Trying to expand in New Jersey
It was time for Twinkie Tush to move on to the next stage of growth, but Gretchen had reservations. When Mike would talk about eventually having a shipping department, she would say, “‘I literally cannot see how that could possibly happen.’ I could not see how we would possibly get out of the house. Like I was like, it’s just not possible.”
One of the main reasons for her hesitation was, “I didn’t see how I was ever going to trust anyone to sew like I did. I trusted them to cut the fabric, I trusted them to snap because, I don’t know, because snapping is less skilled. But I was super controlling about someone sewing them.”
Nevertheless, Gretchen decided to see what it would take to find some seamstresses to hire: “So I said, maybe we should get serious about hiring seamstresses, because I knew that it would have to happen to make it bigger. So in New Jersey I interviewed three or four seamstresses and they were all honest to God awful. Like people who presented themselves as career seamstresses and they would come to me with these horrible things. Like, how do you actually say that this is good work? And it was almost comical. It was just so ridiculous. And the other thing is, in New Jersey where we lived, no one understood why anyone would use cloth diapers, let alone make them, so you had to start with that. And it was just like all signs were pointing to no, no, no, no, no.”
The crazy idea
Expanding in New Jersey didn’t seem viable. At the same time, expansion was critical for the business unless it was to be scaled back to a hobby. This was something that was counter to Gretchen’s drive to make her customers happy.
At this point, Gretchen had a crazy thought. She and Mike had always talked about moving back to Ithaca in the long term. They had friends and family there, and always felt at home whenever they visited.
So Gretchen proposed a crazy idea to Mike: “What about if we send the business to Ithaca? Like what if we somehow expand in Ithaca? And he said, ‘That makes no sense.’ I said, ‘I know it makes no sense. That’s what I’m saying, but just hear me out.’ I said, ‘What if we somehow sent the company ahead of us and then we sold our house here and then we moved up there and we can run the company there?’ And he said, ‘That’s just…you’re nuts. But, whatever, let’s see. Put out some feelers.’ And I think he was saying to put out some feelers thinking I would realize quickly how horrible of an idea it was.”
Gretchen put out two feelers: one to the woman who ran the costume department at Ithaca College, whom Gretchen knew from getting her acting degree; and the other to a local friend in the Labor Department, asking what it would take to hire people in New York. The signs quickly came back pointing to yes, yes, yes.
The Labor Department contact responded with, “…a million leads.” And the costume department head replied in an email, “it is so funny that you just emailed me this because I just ran into my friend Kim who has been a cutter draper at Cornell, the other college in town, for 10 years. And she was laid off. But she really wants to stay in Ithaca and she’s a brilliant seamstress and she has a masters in textile manufacturing.”
Gretchen went to Mike, explaining her conviction that all signs were pointing to yes, “And he couldn’t deny it. He was totally in total agreement.”
Moving Twinkie Tush to Ithaca
It was June of 2012, and the first order of business was for Gretchen and Mike to take a trip to Ithaca and meet with Kim, to see if she was a good possibility to be head seamstress. Her role would be to oversee the sewing of Twinkie Tush diapers in Ithaca while Gretchen and Mike still lived in New Jersey: “We met Kim, we talked about the job with her and basically and she was amazing and it was a perfect fit for her. She basically was going to be the head seamstress, and also oversee and manage the studio since I would be still living in New Jersey.”
During the same trip, Mike and Gretchen also worked with realtors, looking for a space to rent for Twinkie Tush.
By August of 2012, they had identified a 1200 square foot space, and Kim had moved in with them in New Jersey for a few weeks to learn the production process. As Mike describes it, “So Gretch basically taught her how to make the diapers — taught her about the pattern, the production, what to look for, how to run it.”
Gretchen and Mike also went to family for small loans to finance the beginning of the business: “We actually went to family for assistance in starting, to have some capital. We didn’t apply for any outside loans. So we asked for small investments from our families, to start the business in Ithaca. This allowed us to buy the machines that we needed to buy, and allowed us to buy fabric that was needed, and allowed us to do security deposits, and some minor renovations that needed to happen in the space. And it allowed us to feel comfortable with payroll for at least two months, because we knew that there was going to be at least a two to four week training period before we could even consider an item being saleable. So we knew there would be payroll without revenue to begin with.”
In September of 2012, Gretchen and Mike had finalized the negotiations for the space (a building they still rent to this day, although they have expanded and taken more space), and had a crew of 5 employees: Kim, another seamstress, one cutter, and two snappers. Twinkie Tush was now running out of Ithaca, NY, while Gretchen and Mike continued to live in New Jersey!
The Ithaca Shuffle
Throughout this story, it is clear that Gretchen and Mike had a passion and drive for Twinkie Tush that is almost hard to fathom. Every ounce of energy and waking moment was devoted to making an outstanding product and serving as many customers as possible. However, this becomes even more pronounced as Mike describes the nine months they spent running Twinkie Tush from afar:
“The way it would work is that team would work Monday through Friday in Ithaca, producing the load that Gretchen would give them.
On Friday nights, I would get home from work around five, 5:30. We’d load our three and a half year old twins into the car. We would drive up to about an hour outside of Ithaca, where Gretch grew up and her parents still live, in Vestal, New York. We would get there three or four hours later.
We would sleep there Friday night, Gretch and I would wake up on Saturday morning, drive into Ithaca. She would do quality control through the whole batch, and we would then prepare the shipping for the week because we were stocking every week at this point. We would prepare the shipping and then, late Saturday night, come back to her parents.
Gretch would wake up Sunday, go back in to prepare the production lot… the needs for the upcoming week I would say in Vestal with the twins and her parents on Sunday. Gretch would come back by like dinnertime Sunday.
We would then all get back in the car Sunday night, drive the four hours home to New Jersey, then I would get up Monday morning to go to work and Gretch was home with the twins. And she’d do all the administrative work. This pattern lasted nine months from September (2012) until June (2013). Basically we did that every week except for maybe two.”
The end of the sweatshop
This change in business model allowed Gretchen to quadruple production — from 200 diapers a month, to 800 a month. While she had originally been planning on sewing as well, she found that this increase in production also meant a significant increase in administrative work:
“I discovered that there was a ton more administrative work. So I had planned on sewing. But I found that it just worked better for me to turn it over and compartmentalize. And I would still sew some stuff, but it was just easier to keep everything there. So what I would do is if there was a group that had a fabric that I knew was $125 a yard or something, that I was still wanting to be controlling about, I would make those diapers. Or if there was like something that had gone wrong that needed a repair, I would do that…because I still understand the diapers better than anyone else. But pretty much I turned it over. And that was the hardest thing. But I knew that I had to do that, or it was over, you know what I mean? I had to turn it over.”
At the same time, there was a huge relief in freeing herself from her self-imposed sweatshop: “Oh my God, it was such a relief.” When I commented that she had been working unreasonable hours that employees might normally go on strike over, she said, “That’s exactly right! It’s so true. If an employer treated me that way. I’d be like, ‘Who do you think you are? This is nuts!’ And I did that to myself. Well, it’s funny because I would think, my employees come and work for eight hours a day and they get fairly compensated and then they go home and spend time relaxing with their families, you know, have a life. It’s totally different!”
Moving the family to Ithaca
Now that Twinkie Tush was settled and thriving in Ithaca, it was time to decide how to get the rest of the family relocated there. As Mike recalls, “The reason we wanted to send the business first was to make sure it was viable. We didn’t want to sell our house in New Jersey and do all that for nothing. So, we moved the business to Ithaca in September 2012. By the end of that year, I knew that it was only a matter of time that we would be moving. Somewhere in the next four to seven months it would be time to go.”
Mike began to negotiate with his employers about flexible work arrangements, working remotely, and commuting to New Jersey a few times a week. He wasn’t ready to quit and work full time for Twinkie Tush just yet: “Because I was scared. We were like, we don’t want to lose our health insurance.” However, in the midst of these discussions, his company decided on some layoffs, “They did a wave of layoffs at my job, and they came to me and they said, ‘You are going to be part of these layoffs.’ And I was one of the only few people not crying that day because it was like, ‘You’ve made my decision for me.’ They made that decision for me and it was the best thing that ever happened.”
One last hurdle was selling their house in New Jersey. They had unfortunately purchased it at the peak of the housing bubble and were now underwater on their mortgage. Gretchen recalls, “The other thing that is crazy looking back on it now, is that we bought our house in New Jersey at the peak of the market before the housing crisis. And then, by the time wanted to sell it, we were way under water. So, to sell our house, we had to bring a lot of money to the table, like basically all of our savings. So in addition to leaving the job, we were giving all of our money to get out of New Jersey. We literally went back to grounds zero. Square one financially, everything just to get out of there.”
However, looking back, she doesn’t recall that there was any doubt in her mind that it was the right thing to do: “There was never a moment that felt like this was the wrong thing to do. It just was, let’s just do this. All signs point to yes. And I’m ever grateful that it happened the way it did. And then my God, our life is so amazingly different now!”
Managing a small business
It’s now 6 years later, and Twinkie Tush and Gretchen and Mike’s family are both happily settled in Ithaca.
For Gretchen, one of the most difficult transitions has been managing an organization: “I did not anticipate that managing employees would be one of the hardest parts of the whole thing. And it’s definitely a whole other can of worms. And Mike and I both had some management experience, him more than I did, but not in this way, not with something that I cared so deeply about.”
As far as sewing goes, Gretchen is mostly involved in developing new items: “The only thing I sew now is the new stuff. “Like if I’m developing something new I’ll make it first, and play around with it. Probably have some fun.”
Gretchen and Mike have another son now, and Twinkie Tush diapers are still in high demand. In addition, Gretchen has added clothing, underwear, and is planning a women’s clothing line as well.
In the next post, we’ll dig deeper into Gretchen’s business philosophy and some of the themes that have enabled her and Mike to create a sustainable, heart-led business.