Bold Colors - 2013 Spring Collection Fashion Trends -

visit babywisp.com

With spring just around the corner, many fashionable moms have been busy shopping for the perfect Easter Dress.  The difficulty you will find is that many traditional pink accessories you’ve come to know and love don't seem to fit with the bold new colour palettes called to action for Spring.

According to Pantone (a worldwide authority on fashion colour).  The key for this upcoming Spring season will be to keep a balance between light & bright.

This calls for bold colours and floral prints alongside neutral colours and pastels.  It is exactly what you’ll see from big name fashion designers in in their shows, on the runways, and of course you’ll find some of the same colours in clothes at the malls.

As a mom who loves to outfit her little girl in fashionable clothes and accessories, you’ve probably guessed that at Baby Wisp ^TM, we're creating new accessories you've never seen before that actually stay in baby fine hair.   We stand by our committment to keep out toxic metals, glues, gems and chemicals from our products through regular testing and using crafting techniques that take longer to make but keep your lil one safe.  

We’ll keep your little one looking posh and unique  in modern shades and exclusive accessories that you won’t find anywhere else!  Our small snap fancy bows are available in over 20 colours so look here first when you're trying to find a match for hard to match outfits.

 The following dresses are just a small sample of what you can expect from major retailers this spring.  We picked a more affordable price point to begin with.

        

~ Spring Dresses from Old Navy

So for this easter season we’ve decided to offer our most popular bow in even more non-traditional modern trend-setting colours!

Cobalt Blue

Bold Cobalt blue mixed with the light floral patterns make this a bold yet distinct girly look.  She won’t even miss the pink and at the same time she will be making an impressionable fashion statement this Easter.  You could even use the grey shown below with this dress and still look well coordinated.

---

Satin Grey

Satin Grey has become a neutral basic like black or brown of yesteryear and as you probably already know, having a grey hair accessory opens doors for using it across seasons and multiple outfits.

---

Emerald Green

Check out this emerald green look. Do you have a matching outfit or accessory that you can wear this spring that has these colours in it? Of course you do! You already know how hot this colour is for Spring 2013!   Note the cobalt blue has peeked its way in to this pattern as well but we still want you to check out our new Emerald Small Snap Fancy Bow. Not only are these colours popping up in dresses for the season but even coloured jeans as well.  Baby girl might even have a hard time going back to regular old pink!  

---

We'll bring you more spring colour tips in the coming weeks so stay tuned on facebook and sign up for our newsletter to keep in the know and be notified of the upcoming spring deals.  Our Clearout of discontinued items has begun here.  

Christmas is a great time to give and receive gifts for your children that are bright, sparkly and glittery.  It's during this time that I am especially proud of Baby Wisp and our commitment to lead, cadmium, and mercury - free products. Here's our latest creation for the bigger girl - vintage rosettes on satin headbands. Notice the handwrapped satin and acrylic gem centers I see tonnes of products advertised to children that contain crystals, paints and metals.  Some come out and say that their products do contain lead and some make no mention of it.  As a mother of small children, I see first hand that my kids play with tonnes of items throughout a day and sometimes put these products to their mouths  without thinking. And that is the danger of lead injestion or absorption for kids, in that they "mouth" these products and injest lead.  Even trace amounts of lead can affect children moreso than adults.  This article is quite informative about what to look for and how to protect yourself when purchasing toys & jewellery http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2009/09/17/f-lead-exposure-children-safe-levels.html When I launched Baby Wisp, my daughter and all my family and friends who could wear the products were wearing it.  There's a personal responsibility, integrity and connection with my products that ensures that I will choose safety over profits.    I wonder though about companies that are looking to make a fast buck.  How can we as consumers protect ourselves from this?  Are there any government checks that ensure companies are operating in a legal & responsible manner?  Well, that question was answered for me this October when Health Canada called me to meet about Baby Wisp's adherence to the Children's Jewellery Regulations.  Hair accessories fall under this category of consumer products. I am versed in the regulations and in fact, exceed regulations by testing not only for the mandatory lead content restrictions but also the voluntary restrictions of cadmium.                            We test the metals of the clips but also the rivets within the clip, the paint covering the clip, the paint on the logo of the clip and all the gems used in our products.  We have over 25 separate tests by an accredited laboratory on file thus far.  (That's expensive but worth it!)  I was in fact, relieved when they came to visit our warehouse and check on our goods and requested to meet with the owner of the company.  That sounds strange, doesn't it that I was relieved?  But consider this:  for one thing, Baby Wisp has become a big enough company that Health Canada had us on their radar to visit us in their cyclical enforcement of the regulations (under jurisdiction of the Canada Product Safety act) and secondly - that means they are doing a job for the Canadian Public to ensure that companies take responsibility for what they are bringing to market for consumers and protecting us from harm.  Both from a business and a consumer standpoint, this is very comforting to know the system is working.  Our government is taking our children's safety seriously and so are companies like Baby Wisp.

   

The Safety officers and I sat down and talked about the products, testing, and some new upcoming regulations that are currently voluntary- one being Cadmium regulations. We have been voluntarily testing for this also for our own peace of mind.  Cadmium is a highly toxic substance, three-qua rters of cadmium usage today is in nickel-cadmium batteries. It is suspected that manufacturers have started to replace lead, which is highly restricted in children's products, with cadmium. Cadmium is a low cost metal, easy to work with, and has similar characteristics to lead. Check out this link to learn more about cadmium and its threats . It’s pretty scary to think that manufacturers are aware of the hazards of this substance and they still choose to use it as a substitute to lead, in children’s products of all things.  The only reason to do this would be to get products cheaper, get around current mandatory lead limits, and save money on expensive laboratory testing.

This is not meant to be a scary post at all, only thought it was a good opportunity to make our customers aware of what to look for / what questions to ask when buying metallic or embellished products for your children during this gift giving season.   Maybe you didn't know this about lead, mercury and cadmium but we did ...and thought you should know that we care and why you should too.

Baby Wisp has a rock solid conscience about what we sell so when you're considering buying something that seems like a good deal this holiday season, please ask yourself who you're buying from and whether they take steps to put their customer safety first.

 

Yes, I recently finished reading the book, "50 Shades of Grey" and um, well I only read it because it was on our book club list and I want those hours of my life back.  ;)...but my  blog post has nothing to do with the book, it has to do with business reasons to limit your colour offerings of products.  

In the case of Baby Wisp, we are able to offer a large variety of shades of Pink, but not very many of blue or special colours like this season's hot tangerine trend.  Why?

This post is inspired by the 5 or so emails I received in June for special request colours to be offered in our products.   I thought it might be a good opportunity to share a business lesson I learned the hard way.  This, of course, is in my humble opinion only based only on my personal business experience so take it or leave it (for those who are interested in this blog for the business advice I share).

Running a girl's accessory company, I can tell you that Baby Wisp sells more pink than all other colours combined.  How is this possible?  First, consider that we offer at least 3 different pinks in each collection. We have close to 30 collections which means we stock more pink than any other colour.

Take, for example, our polka dot mini latch clip 5 pack.  3 pink variations of polka dot ribbon at the top while our other polka dot pack is more mixed with only 2 pinks.  We sell more of the pink packs 3:1.  I could illustrate this across many of our offerings.

From a customer perspective, you can easily see the logic for the purchasing of pink over other colours.  The majority of a girl's wardrobe in Canadian  society is pink (yes, gross generalization and no stats backing that claim up- opinion piece here people!) so it would make sense that when accessorizing, you would purchase accessories that would get the most use possible out of them.  Especially, for high end, high quality boutique accessories, it just makes sense to optimize your investment.  For gifting purchases, you are pretty much guaranteed that buying her a pink hair bow is going to match something in her wardrobe.

From a Business perspective, consider the cost of stocking say...ORANGE.  We sold approximately 10 last year online.  Selling ten bows in a year could not sustain our business.

It's the only orange product we carry so it's not that it's in competition with other styles.  It's the colour itself that is limiting it's sales.  We did sell ten though, so there are customers who want it...but to take up expensive inventory space and divert cash away from investing in other stronger selling products that move at 100 or 500X faster rate; it does not make much sense.

Being a specialty boutique does mean we offer unique products, styles, and colours so we do try and offer grey, yellow, navy, orange and green but the balance we strike is that those colours are very, very restricted and cannot be offered across all collections due to warehouse space and cash reasons.

We take very seriously the feedback of our customers in our growth strategy so with enough emails, phonecalls, tweets and facebook messages from our retail and wholesale customers we continue to expand to new styles and colours each season.  Trend-setting based on customer driven styles.  Speaking of, what type of new products or styles would you like to see Baby Wisp carry?  Join the facebook conversation or comment here.