A Product Update First

If you’ve been following along my founder journey, you know that last fall I made the difficult decision to let go of my original Nest design (what you see currently pictured on my website) and rebuild elements of it from the ground up.

I didn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater per se”, but… let’s just say I drained away a lot of (very expensive) bathwater. That decision cost me time, resources, and more than a few sleepless nights. But it was the right call… and I’ve never been more certain of that than I am today.

The MOI Nest “2.0” has just completed an intensive round of user testing. And I am now moving back into the gauntlet of manufacturing: sourcing, tooling, sampling, pre-production and then production. It will be a months-long process that I hope will allow me to be in market by September.

I am dying to share photos of this new product with you… but before I can show you anything, I need to get my patent updated and refiled.

Before I show it to anyone publicly, I will be showing it to you: my community of supporters privately. Stay tuned.

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Then This Article Landed In My Inbox

This weekend, one of my investors forwarded me a Hustle article: How Big Diaper Absorbs Billions of Extra Dollars from American Parents with a note: “Maybe-relevant discussion in comments?”

Very relevant, thank you Dan.

The timing felt almost cosmically appropriate: here I am finally re-entering the manufacturing process on a product designed to transform the diaper changing experience, and this buzzy piece drops.

I want to walk you through it because buried inside a business story about Pampers and market share is something that is far more interesting than corporate cynicism. It touches on the exact questions I’ve been circling in this newsletter: agency, feedback, and what it actually means to be present with your child during caregiving.

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The Baby Whisperer Who Sold Out (Or Did He?)

Here’s the hook. In 1962, a pediatrician named T. Berry Brazelton published a study arguing that toilet training should begin around age two — well after the age when most children at the time had already finished training. His philosophy was child-centered: wait until the child is ready. Let them tell you.

It was a meaningful shift away from the behaviorist methods of earlier decades, when parents were essentially conditioning their infants like lab subjects. Brazelton’s instinct that children deserve developmental respect was not wrong.

But here’s where it gets complicated.

In 1996, P&G helped fund Brazelton’s personal foundation. He became chairman of the Pampers Parenting Institute. And in 1998, he appeared in a Pampers television commercial introducing the size six diaper… a product designed for children large enough to stand taller than a bathroom sink.

“I’m glad there’s finally a bigger diaper for growing toddlers,” Brazelton said on camera. “What a big help and a terrific idea.”

Brazelton maintained his beliefs preceded his relationship with P&G. Maybe that’s true. But the optics are, at minimum, worth sitting with.

The Hustle does the math: if the average American child potty trains one year later than they might otherwise (say, 36 months instead of 24) the diaper industry captures an additional $3.1 billion annually. Every year. With roughly 3.6 million babies born in the US, that extra year of diapers is worth approximately $858 per child.

Big Diaper is not neutral on the question of when your child should potty train.

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The Part The Article Doesn’t Fully Say

The Hustle frames this primarily as an economic and cultural story. But there’s a mechanical argument was highlighted in the thread of comments underneath the article is actually more relevant to the work I’m doing.

Modern disposable diapers are extraordinarily good at what they do. They wick moisture away from skin so efficiently that a child wearing one can urinate and feel almost nothing. That’s the breakthrough Marion Donovan started in the 1940s, refined over decades by P&G and Kimberly-Clark into something approaching a marvel of absorbent engineering.

And that same marvel is, arguably, precisely what makes potty training harder.

Children learn to use the toilet when they make a connection: this sensation means something is happening, and something needs to happen next. That feedback loop — sensation, awareness, response — is how the body teaches the brain. When you engineer away the sensation of what happens when you “let go” in your diaper, you interrupt the loop.

This is a consequence of design. But when that design consequence happens to extend the diaper phase by a year or more, and that extension is worth $3.1 billion annually to the companies making the product — it’s also worth naming.

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So What Do You Do With This?

It’s too easy to frame this as a straightforward villain story: Big Diaper manufactures dependency, funds compliant pediatricians, and laughs all the way to the bank. And there’s enough truth in that narrative to make it compelling.

But I think the more honest and useful question for parents is this: what does it look like to reclaim agency inside a system that isn’t designed with your agency in mind?

This is the question I keep returning to. Not just about diapers, but about early motherhood more broadly. The systems we operate inside — medical, commercial, cultural — are not neutral. Of course they have incentives and those incentives don’t always align with what’s best for you or your child.

The Gamemaster move isn’t to opt out of the system entirely. Most of us aren’t going to go back to cloth diapers and elimination communication. The gamemaster move is to understand the system you’re inside, and then make conscious choices within it.

That might mean:

• Noticing that your child is developmentally ready to start potty learning earlier than the cultural norm suggests.

• Questioning whether “wait until they’re ready” is developmental wisdom or convenient advice for someone else’s bottom line.

• Hacking a new solution (HINT: when you’re ready to start potty learning and practice, have your toddler wear their underwear under their diaper to reduce the potency of the diaper absorption.)

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The MOI Nest and Potty Learning

I haven’t talked too much about this, because it’s a BEAST to just get my first product to market. Innovation takes time, patience and capital.

But The MOI Nest is part of a larger system that aims to help parents move from diapering into potty learning with more awareness, attunement and play. I am building 3 products that will streamline and reframe this journey.

So as one might imagine, I have thoughts about potty learning. Quite a few, actually.

No, I will never be the person to “teach a technique” or “write a book” on how to introduce potty learning to your child. But my system of objects comes with a philosophy. And by way of great design, the hope is that philosophy unconsciously osmoses into caregiving.

Here’s the through-line I keep coming back to: Big Diaper removed the feedback loop from your child’s body. The Nest is designed to restore the feedback loop for yours.

Not the sensation of wetness because that’s your child’s work to reclaim, in their time. I’m talking about the sensation of presence: of a moment that’s bounded and intentional. Caregiving that feels chosen vs. endured.

That’s what micro-flow actually is. Forget productivity hacks or optimization… it’s moving through a moment and actually being in it.

The practice builds the capacity. And you have 5,000 chances to practice.

Maggie