The swaddle and blanket that keeps your baby at the perfect temperature and helps babies in the developing world at the same time
Little Lotus baby products are a revolutionary new line of products designed to keep babies at the ideal temperature. With Little Lotus, you can keep your baby comfortable, while helping babies all around the world. Our products include:
Little Lotus products use a proprietary fabric that is super soft and baby friendly. Originally developed for NASA, these materials are designed to help balance your baby’s skin temperature to reduce overheating and cooling. The technology draws excess heat if your baby is too warm, and releases the warmth it if they start to cool down. This means less temperature fluctuations and your baby staying more comfortable.
In addition to the proprietary fabric, the Little Lotus swaddles and sleeping bags have unique features that make them extra easy to use, and provide extra comfort for your baby. Our team of designers from Timbuk2, Northface, Nike and Maclaren talked to dozens of mothers to understand challenges with current swaddles and sleep sacks to come up with the optimal design.
The bottom zipper and the enclosures on both shoulders allow you to take the swaddle/sleeping bag on and off much more easily than other products in the market. You can do a diaper change with the product still on. The swaddle has wings that can be folded back, when the baby’s arms want to be out.
For every Little Lotus swaddle, sleeping bag, cozy blanket or scarf purchased during our campaign, we will help a baby in a developing country with the Embrace infant warmer.
The artwork features the hand tracings of mothers and babies in from all over world. The goal of the artwork is to raise awareness about infant mortality and global motherhood. A subset of the artwork, featuring tracings of babies & mothers helped by Embrace, is the print on the Little Lotus products.
Little Lotus Swaddles and Sleeping bags (0-12 months):
Little Lotus cozy blanket (0-5 years)
The Little Lotus cozy blanket has a layer of premium cotton on top. The bottom layer, which contains our proprietary technology, has a soft and luxurious texture. The blanket is finished with a satin border.
The origins of Little Lotus go back to the Embrace infant warmer. Embrace was started in 2008 by a team of graduate students at Stanford, including co-founders Rahul Panicker and Jane Chen. We were challenged to develop a baby incubator that costs less than 1% the cost of a traditional incubator. Ultimately, we created a product that uses a phase change material, similar to what’s used in the Little Lotus products, to keep give vulnerable babies the critical warmth they need.
Embrace has been recognized internationally. We won the Economist Innovation Award, the Fast Company Design for Social Good Award, and have been featured in media around the world. Last year, Beyonce gave a donation to get the Embrace infant warmers to 9 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, through our partnership with the Millennium Promise. We also presented our work to President Obama at the White House’s first ever Maker-Faire.
To date, Embrace has helped 150,000 babies. But our goal was always to reach 1 million babies. We’re hoping Little Lotus will enable us to do that. For every Little Lotus baby swaddle / sleeping bag, blanket or scarf purchased during this campaign, we will help a baby in a developing country with the Embrace warmer.
Our work was just featured last week in the April edition of Oprah Magazine’s (15th Anniversary) and in Town and Country.
Touch Our Future is an art installation by Artist Drue Kataoka in collaboration with Embrace Innovations, to raise awareness for infant mortality and global motherhood. The hand tracings of mothers and babies in 14 developing countries, many whom have been helped by the Embrace warmer, are featured in the digital interactive artwork. The work of 10 organizations, all working on interventions to combat infant mortality, are also featured on the art installation website.
In addition, leaders and activists around the world have participated in the artwork by lending their hand traces, including: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Christy Turlington, Chelsea Clinton, Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway, Heidi Klum, Stella McCartney, Arianna Huffington, Marc & Lynne Benioff, Stanford University President John Hennessy, award-winning Chef Daniel Boulud and many more. You can download the Touch Our Future mobile app and lend your hand to the artwork as well.
Little Lotus is introducing a scarf inspired by the ‘Touch our Future’ artwork, featuring the hand traces of mothers and babies whom have been helped by the Embrace infant warmer. This beautiful scarf is 100% silk, georgette and handmade in Italy, a few hundred yards from Lake Como, by an artisanal maker.
Little Lotus Baby has a team with extensive manufacturing experience. Specifically:
1. We have a top tier team with many years of experience bringing new products to market.
2. We have deep expertise creating products for babies.
3. Little Lotus Baby products is the result of detailed planning. We’ve spent a lot of time designing, prototyping, testing, and re-designing to achieve the final designs.
Despite our expertise and careful planning, there are risks to the project:
RISKS IN MANUFACTURING
Although we’ve carefully selected a factory that has a history of producing high quality baby products, this is our first time working with the factory and we can’t anticipate how well their production quality will satisfy our strict QC standards. There may be production delays if we need to address quality issues as they arise.
RISK DUE TO EXCESS DEMAND
Due to the long lead times for manufacturing baby products, we had to place an initial order with the factory in advance of our Kickstarter campaign. Should the Kickstarter campaign demand exceed our forecast, there will be a delay in shipment for the additional quantities.