Honest Company Crosses the Final Frontier of Baseball Apparel With Team-Logo Diapers

Head on over to the Major League Baseball shop and you’ll find your favorite team’s logo slapped on all sorts of outdoor clothing—hats, jerseys, jackets and even ugly sweaters. For the true devotee, a favorite team’s logo can nestle still closer to one’s heart (and other places) in the form of bras, swim trunks and even thongs. Now comes the latest addition to the branded-apparel lineup, and this time it’s for young fans—about as young as they get, in fact.

Get ready, America, now you can buy official Major League Baseball diapers.

For the kids, of course. The MLB has partnered with The Honest Company—maker of a range of personal care products and household cleaners, in addition to designer diapers—to introduce the “Born a Fan” collection. It makes its debut at Target today.

The line features the team logos for six clubs (the Red Sox, Yankees, Cubs, Giants, Cardinals and Dodgers) imprinted on Honest’s super-absorbent, hypoallergenic, plant-based, eco-friendly diapers. Target will be the exclusive retailer for the collection over the next few weeks. Starting May 1, the team diapers will be available at other retailers and via Honest’s own site.

Given that there’s essentially no article of clothing left that MLB hasn’t yet licensed, diapers were bound to come along sooner or later. “Looking at the niche area of consumer products, [we asked ourselves:] ‘Where are we not?’” said evp of business Noah Garden. “This was one of those places.”

You’d think that a consumer products giant like Kimberly-Clark or P&G would snare a deal like this, but Garden said that Honest is “a partner that makes a lot of sense”—largely for actress/founder Jessica Alba’s stated commitments to family, community and environment. It probably didn’t hurt that she’s also a baseball fan.

The partnership with MLB “was a natural fit,” Alba told Adweek, recounting how she grew up in a baseball family, played ball as a kid and still takes her family to ball games. America’s pastime, she said, “is one of the few spots where you can take kids.”

Alba recounted that she was the one who approached MLB with the offer to make team-branded diapers, and hastens to point out that her products—unlike much licensed gear one sees for sale—isn’t just a diaper with a team name slapped on it.

“We do more fashion-forward, trendy design and seasonal designs,” Alba said. The Born a Fan collection incorporates the team logos as part of a more elaborate, locally inspired motif—a four-leaf clover for Boston, the Golden Gate Bridge for San Francisco and so on.

“For each diaper print, the idea was to take inspiration from the city and find a landmark and sprinkle that into the illustration style,” relates Honest Company art director Joey Manfre. “We wanted it to feel like it had a local perspective.”

For Alba’s company, the advantage of partnering with Major League Baseball is not so much in margin (at $13.99 for the 40-count pack, the team diapers are priced the same as the brand’s other diapers) as it is in opening the brand to a demographic of hardcore baseball fans who may not have known about Honest before.

It may also work to distance the brand from difficulties created in March of last year after The Wall Street Journal sent a bottle of Honest’s laundry detergent to a lab and discovered it contained an irritating chemical that Honest claimed it didn’t use. Honest countered that the story contained “factual inaccuracies and misleading statements,” but the company did reformulate its detergent several months later. Honest has also weathered widespread complaints in 2015 about its sunscreen, and it voluntarily recalled its baby powder earlier this year.

Continue Reading

Robert Klara

@UpperEastRob

Robert Klara is a senior editor for Adweek, where he specializes in covering the evolution and impact of brands.