An Open Letter to the Product Manager at Luvs

To Whom It May Concern:


I was wondering if you take suggestions.

Before I drop the bomb of my brilliance on you, let me first say that I have five children, the oldest of whom is ten and a half years old. When he was born, we wanted to give him the best of the best, so when we went for our first package of diapers, we shelled out twelve dollars for a small package of Huggies, knowing that we were loving him more than the parents who buy cheap diapers love their children.

Since we were new to the game, it took awhile for us to realize that what we were paying for was diapers that looked cute but didn’t do much by way of absorption. So we switched to Pampers. Now, I am fully aware that P & G makes Pampers and Luvs, so hopefully you won’t be insulted by this, but we were not impressed by Pampers any more than we were impressed by Huggies.

So we’d lived. We’d learned. And then we got Luvs. Talk about LOVE! Not only were we saving tons of money by buying Luvs, our precious baby was going through fewer clothing changes throughout the day! We were happy parents, and he was a happy baby.

We have since used Luvs diapers for all five of our children. If I had to guess, I would say that I have probably changed roughly 13,000 diapers since 1999. Hey, that’s probably a lot of money lining the pockets of the good people at Proctor and Gamble! Ha, ha, ha, ha!

But there is one small problem. Since I’ve used your diapers on my children for such a long time, and because I know them like I know my own reflection, I am aware that you have made some changes to Luvs within the past couple of months. Oh, a new, inexperienced mother may not of have been so keen, but you can’t get much past a woman with my tenure.

So, whatever it is you’ve done to change Luvs has made me sit up and take notice. In fact, it’s made me take notice at 5:00 in the morning every day for the past week and a half.

My almost-one-year-old son takes an 8-oz. bottle of formula before bed each night. The “old” Luvs would have scoffed at such a threat, taking that kind of volume like a man. But the “new” version sees that coming and just crawls into a corner, whimpering and sucking its thumb, thinking, “Please don’t do this! I can’t handle it! I’m new! It’s just too much to take!”

The reason I know this is because for the past week and a half my son has woken up screaming (at 5am) because his “new” Luvs diaper has leaked so much that he is soaked to the bone, all the way up to his neck, requiring a bath (at 5am) and new bedding.

If your almost-one-year-old is wide awake after his bath (at 5am), he isn’t going to stand being sent back to bed without being fed. So, we also have to give him a bottle before tucking him back in to try to sleep until our other four children are up for the day.

The problem is that by now we are wide awake and up for the day.

By lunch-time I’m in a semi-coma, trying to take care of my family when I was woken up at dark-thirty because of your “new” Luvs.

So here is my suggestion: You geniuses at P & G take all of the money you are saving by having redesigned Luvs, and you buy a bus ticket. You take that bus from Cincinnati to my house every morning so that YOU can get up with the baby, give him a bath, change his bedding, give him a bottle, put him back to bed, then deal with the rest of my children and other responsibilities for the rest of the day.

His bottles are in the white kitchen cabinet, his formula is in the cupboard above the microwave. (He likes the water pretty warm.)

We’ll be expecting you tomorrow morning at 5:00.


Sincerely,

Shelby Birdwell