First of all, welcome,
@ibabycasper ! I love your cloth diapers with tails, they are so cute. Please keep going with those!
If you want to venture further into the domain of disposables, I have a kind of crazy suggestion that I think people would like. A user here,
Joediaper, posted a
thread a while ago about the mods he made to adult diapers to bring their design to be more in line with modern designs for babies. I like what he did. I think it would be
fabulous if someone at least did the initial legwork (feasibility-wise) to try and mass manufacture an upsized modern baby diaper equivalent in adult size ranges. Think along the lines of picking your favorite baby diaper these days and directly scaling it up, skipping a few size numbers in the process.
Features would include, if I had all my wishes fulfilled, in no particular order:
- Made in a responsible place with decent standards and oversight, where they give a hoot about how they're sourcing materials and testing the stuff they'd be putting next to our skin all the time.
- A cut and profile that is nearly identical to (but scaled up from) an existing, even generic, baby diaper brand.
- A good, soft, well-engineered and actually waterproof clothlike backsheet.
- A fun, themed print, with more than one print type in a bag for variety's sake. Doesn't have to be super pastel-y and traditionally babyish (see Honest diaper prints, for example). I'd actually like to see something tasteful and plausibly trendy for an adult to wear...while being just little-coded enough.
- Super ultra mega impossible bonus points if you were able to clinch an actual license for a character print, even in an older or less known IP franchise. AFAIK that would be immensely groundbreaking.
- Nice tall leak guards.
- Loop landing zone closure at the front.
- Single ears on each side with single big, rounded/filleted hook tabs
- Hefty, soft stretch side panels with enough stretch to be comfy and move with you but not so much that the diaper sags like crazy when wet (under normal conditions). You'll probably want slightly lower elasticity than Molicare Premium Elastics, but they're in the right ballpark, which shows that it can be done...
- Effective odor control. See: Crinklz, MegaMax.
- Moderate capacity (what we call "moderate"). Enough for relatively light overnights and 4-6 hr daytime use. Maybe like 1100 mL real-world absorbency, 3500-4500 mL ISO.
- Wider than usual, nearly rectangular padding front to back.
- Really good compression and stability of the core layers, with as little clumping, shifting, and lift-off of the topsheet/ADL as possible.
- Hefty, wide, soft elastic at the back for fit and blowout prevention.
- Packaged with a single fold, not two folds.
- Packaging stylized so that it wouldn't look out of place in a grocery store diaper aisle, sitting up with the rest.
Would such a diaper work for everyone? Would everyone be into the concept? No, probably not, on both counts. However, with any luck this product would be good enough to make some converts.
Would this be easy? No, it would probably require some tooling changes at the manufacturer and some materials R&D (at least, searching and sourcing from different vendors) and that probably would get pricy.
Have some AB/DLs been looking for this forever (at least, since the late 1990s)? Yes, and I suspect I'm not the only one.
