As demand for eco-friendly diapers grows, startup Kudos is doubling its Target presence

This March, Kudos will double its Target presence amid growing demand for cleaner ingredients in personal care products. For the 4-year-old brand, it’s a milestone moment that requires significant scaling behind the scenes. But the expansion is also the latest example of the many disposable diaper brands coming to shelves and marketplaces to compete with the likes of Pampers and Huggies.

As parents become increasingly material-conscious, brands like Kudos are positioning themselves as a cleaner diaper alternative. Some, like Coterie, Millie Moon and Pura, advertise a lack of dyes, fragrances or chlorine. Others, including Dyper and EcoPeaCo, use bamboo as a main material instead of plastic. For its part, Kudos has a 100% cotton lining that’s unique to its brand, meaning there’s no plastic touching a baby’s skin.

“Parents care so much about the ingredients touching their baby’s skin,” Saigal said. “So you’re seeing more of a push toward these brands with natural materials.”

Growing demand

In a March 2023 survey of around 1,500 parents, What to Expect found 38% of moms were currently using eco-friendly or natural disposable diapers, versus traditional disposable diapers. What’s more, compared to a 2017 survey, What to Expect found that moms were 57% more likely to say they considered using eco-friendly diapers. They were also 75% more likely to say they considered natural or organic diapers when deciding which brands of diapers to choose.

Sarah Ryan, director of research at What to Expect, said parents are increasingly thinking about safety in their buying choices. “Safety as a primary concern means something different in every category,” she said. “In some categories, it means asking, ‘Does it have harmful chemicals in it?’ In others, it’s, “Will it help me keep my baby safe?'”

But this impulse is often at odds with another key buying factor: price. What to Expect found that 60% of families say diapers are a strain on their budget. And natural or clean diapers are a more expensive purchase: A Size 1 Kudos diaper costs about 37 cents per diaper, compared to 27 cents for a standard Huggies diaper. Ryan said many parents are increasingly registering for diapers to help defray the expense.

Still, Kudos’s Saigal said the natural category is growing at twice the rate of the market as a whole. “It shows that there is demand, and you’re going to continue to see that growing,” she said.

Behind the scenes

Saigal, a mechanical engineer and alum of Proctor and Gamble, launched Kudos in 2021. She’d previously launched a sanitary pad company in India that used banana tree fiber and felt there were more opportunities to root plastic out of personal care products.

The World Economic Forum says disposable diapers are a leading cause of plastic waste, with about 300,000 being sent to landfills or incinerated each minute. While no diaper on the market is biodegradable, Saigal said the formulation used by Kudos means there’s as little plastic in the product as possible.

“When people hear ‘eco-friendly diaper,’ they assume it’s biodegradable, but that’s not actually the case,” she said. “It just means there are fewer added chemicals, which is absolutely a step in the right direction, but it’s not the whole story.”

After launching as a DTC business, Kudos appeared on “Shark Tank” in 2023 and scored backing from both Mark Cuban and Gwyneth Paltrow. This propelled awareness, and the brand went on to raise $3 million in seed extension funding in the summer of 2024 to keep scaling, bringing its total fundraising to over $6.2 million.

In 2023, the company sold about 20 million diapers. But as demand grew, Saigal said Kudos had to make changes to its supply chain to keep up. Last year, the company moved all its manufacturing to the U.S., which has helped control transportation costs and is now insulating the company from any potential tariffs in places like China or Mexico.

“As we were launching into Target, we rethought our supply chain,” Saigal said. “Now it’s cheaper for us to manufacture in the U.S. because we’re saving on transportation costs.”

Cotton challenges

But scaling a company with a unique product formulation — specifically, the cotton lining — meant having to secure specific suppliers. Kudos uses U.S.-grown cotton, and there are only so many places that can process it into the kind of lining needed for a diaper.

Saigal said it’s a “chicken or the egg” kind of problem — where the larger, legacy companies would need to invest in building up a supply chain and manufacturing facilities to make cotton-lined diapers. Such infrastructure could lead to more sustainable products at lower, more consumer-friendly prices. But the supply chain currently doesn’t exist at a scale that larger corporations would be able to utilize. “[Larger companies] never demanded cotton because it’s too expensive,” Saigal said. “So suppliers are like, ‘OK, well, we don’t need to develop these at large scales because there’s no one to buy it.'”

Saigal said that, in the last four years that Kudos has been developing its products, material prices have come down and the technology has improved. Feminine care products are also increasingly using cotton for absorbent material.

“Hopefully as the supply chain develops, these costs can come down,” she said. “But it’s really up to us to push the boundaries of innovation on these supply chains.”