Carousel Designs Blog

Without a doubt, the cradle becomes a special item when your newborn arrives home.  It’s the first place your baby will sleep after coming home.  Having it properly prepared is important as the baby makes the transition to their new surroundings.

There are many types and styles of cradles available including the more modern gliding cradles.  But whether your cradle is the rocking type or the gliding type, the standard cradle mattress size is 18″ x 36″.  It is important to choose bedding specifically made for the cradle so that it does not bunch, gather or leave gaps between the mattress and the rails.

Cradles are designed for use in the initial months when a baby first arrives home.  Many parents keep the cradle right beside their own bed, at least for the first couple of weeks.  And some parents choose never move the cradle to the nursery at all.  When baby is big enough to move into the nursery, they move right into the crib.

Depending on how and where the cradle is used, there are many options for incorporating cradle bedding into your home.  With literally dozens of designed cradle bedding sets available, coordinating your baby’s first sleeping quarters with the nursery or the bedroom is easy with the vast selection from Carousel Designs.  From designer modern fern to simple, solid white – cradle sheets, bumpers and blankets are available a la carte or as matching bundles to suit every new parent’s needs.

John

We’re pretty excited about what has been going on over at the outlet store .  After a bit of brainstorming, there were several efforts made to “sharpen our pencils”, become more efficient and be better able to offer a wider array of discount baby bedding.

Here are a couple of good points from today’s press release:

“Our designer collections are composed of specific fabrics that have been detailed by our design team,” added Allan Sicat, President of Carousel Designs. “Sometimes a fabric vendor will unexpectedly discontinue a fabric that we use as a part of a designed baby bedding collection. When that happens, we must find ways to optimize and utilize those specific fabrics. We salvage the situation by creating new, limited, high-quality products at deeply discounted prices.”

And to add to this point:

The multitude of steps involved in designing a new collection can take many iterations of testing before producing the end product that is offered on babybedding.com. “When we design a new collection we might make several versions of a crib skirt, for instance, to see which one best aligns with the overall designed collection,” stated Rose Grove, Carousel Designs’ lead designer. “Even though a particular crib skirt or comforter creation doesn’t make it into a designed collection, it still remains well made, beautifully crafted and unique.”

The bottom line?  We just opened the door to greater savings on our website.  If you haven’t dropped by the outlet store lately, check it out.  We have made it even easier to buy unique, high-quality, American-made baby bedding on a budget.

John

I was visiting a new parent forum the other day and noticed a mother-to-be discussing how much she should pay for toddler bedding.  It was an interesting read because she was strictly concerned with price, at first.  And then some other people chimed in with recommendations regarding quality.  It made me consider how we use the word “cheap” and how that term relates to “quality.”

Cheap reminds me of the low-cost pots and pans I bought when I first graduated from college and moved into my own apartment.  (Ok, we all did that, right?)  I didn’t pay much initially, but within several months, the pot handles were falling off and I eventually had to replace all of my cookware.  Lesson learned.  Not only did cheap not satisfy my needs, I had to make a second purchase of cookware because I did not consider quality during my first purchase.

Quality is the relative measure of excellence – the relationship of cost verses value.  The highest quality product is almost never the one that costs the least and it is often not the most expensive either.  I am a big fan of research, especially before buying a big ticket item, and I have found that quality can be a mix of objective testing (How well does it hold up in the wash?) and highly subjective factors (How good did it look?).

One thing that has been a persistent focus at Carousel Designs is quality.  At the same time, we are also able to offer inexpensive baby bedding because there is no middleman to inflate prices.  We design and manufacture everything here in our Douglasville, Georgia facility and that makes us uniquely positioned to offer high quality at lower prices.

I took a look at some of our customer testimonials and thought I would share some of the recent comments.  One word that I didn’t see was “cheap”.
There were several references to “great prices”, “reasonably priced” and “fair prices”.
And the word that I found repeated more than any other was “quality”.  It was mentioned dozens of times.

“I would have paid the same amount for a much lesser quality in a national retail store…”
“Thank you for the speedy delivery, and the outstanding quality of your product…”
“It is so rare, these days, to find such high quality items made in this country. I will recommend babybedding.com/Carousel Designs to all of my friends. Thanks!”

John

Minky is a modern “micro-fiber” fabric that is amazingly soft.  It is quick-drying, highly absorbent, and actually quite strong.  And unlike true mink, minky fabric is completely vegan.

My introduction to minky came when someone gave us a minky crib sheet at our baby shower.  Although it was clearly a soft and luxurious sheet, I was somewhat resistant to the idea of minky because it wasn’t made of cotton.  But as circumstances quickly change when there is an infant in the house, I ended up trying the minky crib sheet out of desperation one evening.  That was when my daughter was about 6 months old. She seemed to like the minky sheet just fine.

However, when I later tried to replace the minky sheet with a cotton sheet, it became clear that my daughter preferred, er, demanded, minky.  That night when we put her down to bed, she immediately started crying.  She was fed, changed and otherwise comfortable so we were puzzled.  After about 20 minutes of high decibel protests, my wife asked me, “Could it be the sheet?”

I sprang into action and ran downstairs, got the minky sheet from the stack of folded laundry and quickly replaced the cotton sheet.  Five minutes later, our baby was asleep.  Needless to say, we bought a couple of extra minky sheets and haven’t looked back.

John