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Eunique Jones Gibson found a lack of representation in baby care products.

Eunique Jones Gibson knew something was wrong with the baby care business more than three years ago when she was looking for training pants for her 3-year-old daughter to support an affirmation routine she and her husband were doing to build the girl’s self-confidence.

She found pants in the package she had at home that were adorned with Cinderella. She looked elsewhere in her home inventory and couldn’t find any training pants with Black licensed characters. Then she texted friends who couldn’t find any either.

“On a normal night, it would have been fine,” Gibson said. “But on this particular night, I really wanted something that supported the affirmation work we had been doing. I realized there was really a lack of representation and inclusivity, and decided that night, Oct. 28, 2019, that I wanted to do something about it.”

That something turned out to be the launch of Big Ups training pants as part of her Happy Hues brand—which officially drops today—with products featuring a diverse cast of characters her daughter and others can relate to.

That it’s taken more than three years is a testament to the fact that it isn’t easy. While Black-owned and targeted beauty products are bountiful, the same can’t be said for baby care, which is still largely controlled by big players led by Procter & Gamble Co. (Pampers, Luvs and Easy Up) and Kimberly-Clark Corp. (Huggies and Pull-Ups). And breaking into the business is difficult and expensive, Gibson said, despite the need for more diverse products.

The percentage of U.S. newborns who are non-white passed the 50% mark for the first time in 2012 by some accounts. And big brands clearly have recognized that fact in much of their marketing, Gibson said, with diverse casts, packaging images and media plans.

“Kudos to those brands for those strides that they’ve made to be more inclusive in their advertising and in their packaging,” she said. But she’s yet to find similar representation in the fictional characters on actual diapers and training pants. She has seen a limited edition offering from Pull-Ups, for example, with Disney’s Princess Tiana, she said, “but we could rarely find them in stores.”

Representatives of P&G and K-C did not respond to email requests for comment by deadline.

For Happy Hues, buying licenses from major media players wasn’t affordable even if diverse characters were available, Gibson said. So her company has created its “Happy Hues Crew” of four ethnically diverse characters in-house with help from outside designers, complete with an animated video series behind them.

Gibson has experience in developing a media platform, having in 2013 created Because of Them We Can, a photo campaign featuring images of children dressed as historical Black icons for Black History Month. With Happy Hues, she’s using content as the underpinning of a Black-owned baby care brand, launching initially as a direct-to-consumer operation with a subscription model aimed to provide shipments every 30 days, Gibson said. Initial products include baby wipes infused with shea butter in addition to the training pants, but she plans to move into diapers eventually. And she’s working with a broker to identify opportunities to expand with outside retailers.

Jack Neff, editor at large, covers household and personal-care marketers, Walmart and market research. He's based near Cincinnati and has previously written for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Bloomberg, and trade publications covering the food, woodworking and graphic design industries and worked in corporate communications for the E.W. Scripps Co.