Sophisticated Baby
Fleurville Mothership  Like many new entrepreneurs, Steve and Catherine Granville started out as dissatisfied consumers. The couple had a child, and they had a lot of things to buy, including a diaper bag. This, specifically, is where the dissatisfaction arose. Most of what they saw, Steve Granville maintains, was poor quality stuff, often tarted up with licensed images of cartoon characters and the like. It was as if the bags were meant to appeal to children. 'But who,' he asks, 'is buying the product?' The answer isn't just parents, but parents his age; he is 37, and his wife is 36. 'We're part of the generation that I would argue is the most sophisticated in terms of brand exposure and analysis,' he says.
So nearly three years ago they started their own brand, which is called Fleurville, and began selling diaper bags and other equipment for people like them. Their mainstay product, called the Mothership, costs about $155. In contrast, you can buy a Classic Pooh Diaper Bag/Backpack, featuring Winnie the Pooh, for $20 at Target and any number of other bags for $50 or so. Fleurville has sold about 30,000 Mothership bags so far, mostly through boutiques. It is available in 10 grown-up-oriented designs, including houndstooth, several colors of wide-wale corduroy and a flashy pink-stripe version that is probably the most popular.
It certainly makes sense that the modern parent wants to carry something that doesn't look, you know, childish. But those who choose the Mothership must be motivated by more than that, since they could have picked up Eddie Bauer's popular $35 Weekender, which is styled to look like something for gym clothes, not diapers. Apart from the fashion factor, the Mothership also sells functionality inspired by 'outdoor gear technology,' according to Granville. For example, the interior cloth is 420-denier nylon. (Which apparently means that it's very strong.) There's nonskid rubber in the shoulder strap, pockets and sleeves for bottles and cellphones, polyurethane triple-coating for waterproofing and so on. There are practical reasons for these features related to the 'human factors' of caring for a baby while on the move. 'It's not all buckles and bows and Mary Poppins,' Granville says. 'It's diarrhea and real nasty stuff.'
In any case, there's another element to the Mothership that may be particularly important in reaching a target audience that is 'sophisticated' about branding. While Fleurville has not bothered with advertising so far, the Granvilles did think very carefully -- obsessively even -- about the company name. 'We wanted the brand to be a bit amorphous,' Granville says. 'A cutesy baby-bag name would limit our market potential.' They hoped to evoke a destination or state of mind and wanted a name that was faintly European, he explains, so that perhaps a discerning consumer would think, 'Must be a big brand in Europe, but I haven't seen it here in the U.S.'
Once this was taken care of, the company, which is actually based in San Rafael, Calif., sent one of its bags to Jodie Foster, and Granville mentioned as much to a reporter for the syndicated celebrity-watching TV show 'Extra.' The producers did a segment on the bags, which led to calls from the publicists for Uma Thurman and Kate Winslet, among others. This was followed by coverage in magazines like InStyle and Us Weekly. 'It just sort of went from there,' Granville says. The obvious precedent here is the Bugaboo Frog stroller (a successful brand in Europe before it came to the United States), which costs more than $700 and has been linked to celebrity moms like Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow. The Bugaboo's rise has perhaps confirmed that although today's parents may be too clever for advertising, many of them will pay an enormous premium to own the same things that famous people have.
One retailer that sells Fleurville bags is the Pump Station, which includes a boutique for new or soon-to-be parents in Los Angeles. Corky Harvey, a co-founder, says its clientele is well off and smart and wants things that are 'functional as well as beautiful.' And does the store carry diaper bags with, say, famous cartoon characters on them? Harvey replies, emphatically, that it does not. The store sells only products that 'elevate motherhood' out of the context of tacky commercialism, she explains. 'Our mothers despise that stuff.'
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 7-24-05: CONSUMED E-mail: consumed@nytimes.com.