Jen Fuller spent the better part of twenty years in advertising and had no intention of starting a company. The idea arrived anyway, while she was feeding her six-week-old daughter, Etta, and noticed the baby staring with complete fascination at the bold monochrome pattern on her jumper while ignoring the plain muslin draped over her shoulder.
Most of us would have filed that away as a charming nothing. Jen, who knew from two decades of work how powerfully the right image holds attention, recognised it instead as information. Newborns see in high contrast long before they see much else, and here was her daughter proving it in real time, telling her that the most omnipresent object in early parenthood, the humble muslin, was a wasted opportunity.
So she set about turning it into something far better. Working alongside an optometrist, she designed muslin patterns to the millimetre, each one calibrated to stimulate a baby's developing vision rather than simply look sweet on a changing table, with separate designs for the newborn weeks and the older stage when a baby's sight has moved on. It is the rare baby product that is genuinely backed by science.
She ran Etta Loves alongside a full-time job and a young family for two years before it grew too big to keep on the side, and she gave it her whole attention. What began as one mother paying very close attention to one baby has become a brand that parents and experts alike trust to make the ordinary business of early childhood do a little more.
Etta Loves belongs on Women's Work because it came from a woman noticing what nobody else had bothered to, and then doing the patient, careful work to prove she was right.