The XX Factor

Bottom Feeders

Conventional wisdom holds that a recession’s no time to launch a new business ( Double X , ahem, has to disagree with that one), but of course that’s not a truism in every industry. Over at our sister site The Big Money , J. Lester Feder writes about the boom the recession has brought to the cloth diaper business, and explains why some startups in the field are flourishing:

At a time when most of the economy is in the toilet, the cloth-diaper business is booming. Cloth diapering has long been a countercultural lifestyle choice, reserved largely for deeply committed environmentalists. It became more popular in the past couple of years as green went from crunchy to hip. Sometimes too hip: Parents in search of eco-status could shell out more than $300 for a single diaper made from designer-printed organic bamboo fabric. While luxury diapers still sell for upward of $100, most are no-frill models retailing for less than $20, converting a new generation of parents looking to cut costs and creating a growing market for entrepreneurs. Cloth-diapering site Diaper Swappers now has more than 67,000 members, and it is adding new ones at a rate twice as fast as before the recession, now around 100 per day.

Read the rest at The Big Money .