March 2002 

Thanks to your continued support this past summer we marked our 10th year in business!

Our Mission remains the same : to enrich the lives of babies and their parents by increased body contact, with a view to transforming future generations.

Our Objectives are : to educate parents on fulfilling babies’ dependency and breastfeeding needs; to support parents who choose to reduce separation from their babies; to make our baby sling the norm in baby transportation.

What a decade it has been. We started out in the early 90’s under the name of the Cotton Container Co. making cloth shipping and recycling bags. I sewed up baby slings mostly on a request basis. Moms saw me using mine and asked me to make one for them. When retail stores started giving away cloth bags my business looked far from promising. Coupled with a move and a new baby in 1992, I almost quit and likely would have if it wasn’t for a persis-tent distributor named Susanne Tingling. She just kept placing baby sling orders!  She then introduced our sling to many of her friends and colleagues who also sold baby products. That, plus an article about us in Today’s Parent magazine, resulted in sales that convinced me that we could run a viable baby sling business.  

By 1994, our sling had seen many design changes and improvements, based on the experiences with our own children (we now had 4) and invaluable feedback from our customers. Another plus was our new sewing contractor Simonne. When a local nightwear company closed, selling off their high end commercial machines to their sewers, she organized the top sewers into a home network called Jordan Selectives. These women are happy working from home and I’m happy to support them.  The industrial machines made it possible to use the denser batting, and our end product became a much higher quality.

There have been many highlights over the years such as when Dr. William Sears spoke at the stage across from our booth at the Toronto Parent Show, giving us a wonderful endorsement – we sold 22 slings the next hour ! Or working a show with Susanne Tingling and her month old twins; receiving our first order from La Leche League Canada and appearing in their catalogue; meeting so many of you; exchanging our birth, breast-feeding and slinging stories.        

Over the years many of you have helped work the booths at various shows across Canada and now into the USA. Many contacts have been made at various Breastfeeding Conferences and Distributor Baby Shows so that our network now includes La Leche League Canada, Baby Retail Stores, Pediatricians, Prenatal Groups, Hospital Gift shops, Chiropractors, Lactation Consultants, and many dedicated Home distributors.

We offered Nursing Wear for breastfeeding moms for a couple of years ’94 to’95 when I had Brianne (our 4th ) because I wanted comfortable cotton nursing wear. It proved to be altogether too much work and expense and we went back to specializing in baby slings to make it easier to run our home based business. We started advertising in magazines focused on the attachment parenting mothers in 1995.

The launch of our website www.heart2heart.ca in 1998 has helped us grow the business and provide wider exposure in every province in Canada and throughout the United States. We currently receive over 200 visits to our website each day; (not just hits) these are people getting baby sling information, asking questions about sling wearing, inquiring about the distributor opportunity, making an online purchase or looking for a local distributor. H2H continues to grow each year to meet the needs of babies & parents.