Ten Years of The Baby Snap Sack® {Part 3}

By Carson Davis

The story behind a decade of stylish comfort, quality, and ingenuity {Part 3}

Once founder Susan Isler designed {Part 1} and completed {Part 2} what would become The Milk and Honey Co. Baby Snap Sack®, she started giving it away to lucky friends and family members. With each sleeping bag, Susan improved her technique. She integrated the adjustable sizing with snaps design and grew in her sewing skills over time. Over and over, pleased parents encouraged her to open an Etsy store. And so, in 2009, she did just that.

Now parents all over the world could find Susan’s sleeping bag. As the orders increased, Susan found a manufacturer to streamline the sewing process and make the sleeping bag look more professional without sacrificing quality. For the past several years, Milk and Honey Co. sleeping bags have been sewn at the Western Carolina Sewing Company (Sew Co.) in the historic Oriole Mill outside Asheville, NC.

Susan continued to fill each down sleeping bag by hand until 2013. She would set-up in her mountainside backyard after her children went to sleep with a pile of sleeping bags, sacks of down feathers, and a scale. After filling one chamber with feathers, she weighed the bag, then filled the next chamber and weighed again, making sure that the down distribution was perfect. This filling and weighing, filling and weighing process was tedious, but attention to detail has been The Milk and Honey Co.’s hallmark from the beginning.

Business kept growing and by 2013, Susan found a company in Ohio to fill the down bags with precise machinery. Today, these sleeping bags are filled by a company in South Carolina, furthering Susan’s goal of keeping production as local as possible. This shift in production has also given her more time to devote to customer service and design, leading to new products and updated versions of classic designs.