Why Etta Loves

Hand picked by Tracey. The prints were what did it — bold, graphic, properly designed, and completely unlike the pale wash of most newborn things. Etta Loves is a British brand founded by Jen Fuller and certified B Corp, which makes it exactly the kind of company the bonnie mob family store was built to sit alongside: small, female-founded, and rigorous about how things are made.

It started with a jumper. Jen's daughter Etta was six weeks old and feeding was going badly. Then during one feed Etta fixed on the black and white pattern on Jen's jumper — and fed. That was the whole beginning. Every muslin, playmat and bath toy since has come from that one observation.

The science, and what it actually says. A newborn is not seeing what you are seeing. Research on neonatal contrast sensitivity puts it at somewhere between a hundred and two hundred times lower than an adult's — a newborn needs roughly fifty per cent contrast before a pattern registers at all. They focus most clearly at about 20 to 30cm, which is the distance between a baby's face and yours during a feed. So a bold dark shape on a light ground is not a design flourish. It is close to the only thing a very new baby can properly make out.

Designed with an orthoptist. Etta Loves work with Laura, a consultant orthoptist with twenty years in children's vision, and with the University of Sussex Baby Lab. Patterned input helps a baby begin to make sense of the world, and the point of these prints is to give them something they can genuinely see and hold their gaze on.

Two stages, by design. The birth to four months prints are high contrast and coarse in scale. From around five months, as colour perception and focus sharpen, the designs step up — smaller scales, more colour, more to work out. Several pieces are reversible or sold in pairs so one purchase covers the whole first year.

Keith Haring, which sealed it. Haring is a long-standing favourite here, and seeing that artwork rescaled and recoloured for a baby's eye made the range a must-have rather than a maybe. There is a Liberty collaboration too — Fairford Shadow and Wharfedale Meadow, reimagined at a scale a baby can read.

The cloth. 100% GOTS certified organic cotton throughout, softer with every wash.

Sensory baby muslins, black and white baby muslins, high contrast newborn muslin squares, swaddles, baby playmats and sensory bath toys — a British B Corp brand, stocked at the bonnie mob.