It's no secret, designing is the part of business I love the most. For me, it's passion, pure enjoyment, and sometimes even therapy. When a day is not going right and I need something to do to feel I had an accomplishing day, all I need is a sketch book, a pencil and a little design time and my day feels better. Throughout the year, while attending various retail shows across Canada and the United States, we gather design ideas given to us by customers. For example, one of our first bib collections in year 2 of business included our very popular Fire Truck bib, which is still a top seller today. That year, we heard from every Police family that we needed to design a Police Car bib, so in year 3 we did. Then, you guessed it, every Paramedic, Ambulance Driver and ER Doctor wanted to know why we had a Fire Truck bib and Police Car bib, but no Ambulance bib. In year 4 we added an Ambulance design. Seeing the look on our customers faces when the FINALLY find a baby related product with an Ambulance on it, for us, is priceless. It's hard to find, and for that reason alone our Ambulance is always a great seller when ever we sell in a metro area, as well as online. If we simply followed baby trends and didn't listen to our customers, our Ambulance design wouldn't exist and we wouldn't have made so many customers happy with this particular design. I could list many more examples of this, where our customers are the ones who inspired our designs. It's for that reason, that we thought a design contest would be great! We hear your requests, but we would love to SEE a design that you come up with! Who knows, we just might pick it to be a future Mally Bibs Design! 

If you follow us on Facebook, you know that we travel a lot for business. There are certain months of the year when we spend more time sleeping in hotels than our own beds and more time in a plane than in a car. Unfortunately this means we are away from our kids. I contstantly have to reassure myself that it's okay to have a really unbalanced work / life scheule for a few months of the year if the rest of the year is a really unbalanced the other way. In other words, sure we miss out on a lot of family time for 2 months, but we are there almost all the time the rest of the year. Thankfully we have a great in house child care system, so that makes it a lot easier but the truth is, we miss them like crazy during our time away, and (much to our surprise) they actually miss us! This of course generates the guilt factor, which means we have no choice but to make up for it! The solution: family vacation! We have gone on a family vacation of some sort every year and we have always had hired help to ship orders while we are away, but this time we decided to do things a little differently and just shut down for 2 weeks. Money saved in hiring shipping help = money saved by our customers! Since no orders will ship for 2 weeks, we thought it was a perfect opportunity to run a BIG EPIC promotion, so that we can return to a flood of orders. Click through to our blog to check it out! 

definition of ethical: eth·i·cal [eth-i-kuhl]  Pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principles of morality; pertaining to right and wrong in conduct.

Since those early days of business, back in 2005, when I came up with the idea for leather baby bibs it's been me who has designed our new products. I'm one of those people who can't stop designing and creating. I'm constantly being inspired and if I have an idea, I have to get out my sketch pad and pencil and start drawing. I usually can't get it off my mind until I start cutting and playing with color combinations. It's just who I am! In fact, my husband jokes that he dreads these 5 words I so often say to him: 'Babe, I have an idea'.