Dear Jane,
Thanks so much for writing to share your thoughts. By way of introduction my name is Christopher Wu. I am the CEO of Paper Culture and also one of the founders.
I really enjoyed reading your thoughts as well as reviewing the links you included. I agree with much of what you said, but in answering your concerns, I wanted to relate a personal story.
My wife and I have a 3 year old daughter who is our first child. I still remember like it was yesterday, the excitement surrounding her birth. Like many first time parents, we were voracious readers prior to her birth. In part because we had that determination to do everything we could that would help our baby, but also, truthfully, because we just simply had no frame of reference.
Throughout the reading, we learned about many of the benefits you described for breast feeding and we were determined to raise our child that way. As our precious baby was born and they cut the umbilical cord, they immediately handed the baby to us to rest against mom's skin for those initial bonding moments. Shortly thereafter, we tried to get the baby to latch to get some of the initial colostrum prior to mom's milk coming in. While we were blessed with a joyous birth, unfortunately, this was the beginning of one of our most stressful periods.
We were determined to raise a breast fed child - but in that initial moment, in the days, weeks and months after - after lactation consultants, 3 or 4 bouts with mastitis, and many many shed tears across baby, mom and family, and some of the most trying points of our very blessed marriage, we just could not get our baby to latch. To say it was stressful would be an understatement. But for us, the substitute was pumping to still give our child many of the benefits. And as you can imagine, pumping then required both bottles and many of the other accessories. Throughout the struggle, truthfully, we were heartbroken. Now, a few years removed and expecting our second child, we have a slightly different perspective - there are undoubtedly numerous fantastic reasons to breast feed, but my personal belief is that there are numerous good reasons why people may not be able or choose to not do it. I personally am an advocate of breast feeding, though we were not able to raise a breast fed child, I hope our second one will be different, but I also surely wouldn't want to suggest to people that there is no other option.
With Paper Culture, our goal is to create products that make a positive contribution to the environment both through their creation and their message. While I personally am an advocate of breast feeding, as a company, we understand that raising children is all about personal, cultural and situational tradeoffs and we're not in a position to advocate one solution for all people. We are fortunate to have 100's of different designs in our catalog. Some of them do have bottles and they actually are not meant to advocate one view or the other for breast feeding. It's similar to how we have Hannukah cards and Christmas cards, we feature straight couples and gay couples, we feature bbq invitations with steak and organic vegetarian images as well - ultimately, we don't advocate one way or the other, but try to give each person an opportunity to find a card that speaks to them and their families for each occasion. We hope that while the bottle cards don't speak to you, that you will find others that do. We plan to continue to include bottles in our
baby shower invitations and birth announcements as they are a common icon of many parents both who breastfeed and those who do not. We are huge supporters of companies such as giggle (whose core principles are one of the reasons we partner with them) and Zoli Baby who feature bottles in their offerings that absolutely have health and the environment as a core principle such as featuring BPA free bottles, those that are often used in parallel with breast feeding, and some that even are made with recyclable material. Having said that, I do think some edits to our text would reflect the inclusive nature of our goal and that phrases like "
true essentials" actually go counter to our inclusive goal and I do plan on editing those with our team and wanted to thank you for pointing them out.
More than anything, I wanted to thank you for spending the time to share your thoughts. I believe our community grows stronger because of the discussion of these issues that many of us feel passionately about and I welcome your continued feedback. I have also posted this response to your blog post and welcome any additional feedback you would have. Thanks again and I hope you've had a wonderful weekend.
Sincerely,
Christopher Wu
CEO, Co-Founder
Paper Culture
