Our Story: a family business in Bendigo, behind a premium baby nappy brand.
Fifteen years in medical and continence-care supply. Then Louis on the way, and the contacts, the testing and the timing all lining up at once.
The honest version
Most baby brands open with a founder-hero story. We won't, because that's not what this is.
Little Puggles is a family business in East Bendigo that already had fifteen years of experience supplying continence-care and medical products for adults, under our parent company Australian First Aid Distributions. When Emma and Marcus learned their first child was on the way, applying that same supply-chain experience to a premium nappy and wipes range made sense. The contacts were there. The factory relationships were there. The testing and certification experience was there. So they built one.
It's something we wanted to get into with the new baby and already have a lot of the contacts through First Aid Distributions, so we thought we could do it.
Emma Hando, co-founder
That's the whole reason. A family business, a real reason to start, no grand speech.
Who's behind it
Emma Hando co-founder
Bendigo born and raised. Public face of Little Puggles and the design-sense lead on the brand. Married to Marcus in November 2024. Lives in Marong, twenty-five minutes out of Bendigo, in country-quiet on purpose.
“We created the range we wanted our own son to have. We make most of the decisions in our home together and bounce ideas off one another.”
Emma
Marcus Hando co-founder
Works behind the scenes on product design. The product designs are his. Marcus and Emma make the decisions together at home, and the brand follows.
Kim Hando
Founder and owner of Australian First Aid Distributions, and Marcus's mother. She started the company in 2011 on the conviction that better continence-care products and better supplier relationships could be brought to the Australian market. Fifteen years of running that business is the heritage Little Puggles draws on, and Kim contributes to Little Puggles educational content. She is not a co-founder of Little Puggles. She is the founder of the parent company that made it possible.
Australian First Aid Distributions: where we came from
Australian First Aid Distributions has operated out of East Bendigo for fifteen years. It is a medical and continence supply business, with a retail store on Murphy Street and online sales Australia-wide, supplying NDIS providers, aged-care facilities, hospitals and retail customers. The adult continence range is Comfort First. The manufacturing relationships sit with offshore partners.
Continence-care products and baby nappies share more than the obvious. Both are absorbent products designed for sensitive skin. Both rely on the same engineering: superabsorbent polymer cores, premium topsheets, breathable backing materials, refastenable tabs or stretch-side designs. Both depend on independent dermatological and chemical testing for credibility. Both succeed or fail on whether they actually feel good against skin.
When the time came to design Little Puggles, we drew on every piece of that infrastructure:
- The same supplier relationships, refined over fifteen years of importing premium absorbent products.
- The same Japanese superabsorbent polymer sources used in continence and baby applications globally.
- The same testing partners: Dermatest in Germany, SGS for chemical testing including PFAS, no chlorine bleach (SGS verified) and mineral-oil-free inks, and Safe Cosmetics Australia for ingredient certification.
- The same shared formulation work on baby wipes. The Little Puggles wipes formula and the Comfort First adult wipes formula are identical: the same gentle, fragrance-free, lotion-free, alcohol-free composition, tested under both brand names.
- The same Bendigo office, Bendigo packaging coordination and Bendigo customer service team.
The Comfort First adult range and the Little Puggles baby range are deliberately distinct brands serving distinct markets. Adult continence customers don't want a baby brand, and baby customers don't want an adult brand. But the manufacturing investment, the testing investment and the supplier relationships are shared, which is what makes a premium nappy viable for a family business in Australia. We wouldn't be doing this without that fifteen-year foundation.
Why a premium nappy
The Australian baby nappy category has two clusters. There is the mass-market end, cheap, available in supermarkets, designed for affordability and broad fit. And there is the small premium-natural end, with scattered certifications, often imported from one of a small number of European or Asian factories on common base specifications. Looking at the category from a supply-chain perspective, the Australian premium end was selling on positioning more than substance. Premium pricing without product-level dermatological testing. Premium positioning without substantiated chemical safety data. Premium aesthetics without the manufacturing investment to make a genuinely better product.
The Little Puggles brief was simple. Build a nappy where the certifications come from the product itself, not just the positioning. That meant product-level Dermatest® Sensitive Skin certification, tested on real human skin rather than reviewed on paper. Independent chemical safety data for PFAS and no chlorine bleach (SGS verified). Japanese superabsorbent polymer rather than the mid-tier alternatives that dominate the category at this price point. A silk-protein topsheet for a soft, smooth feel (SeriPro™). Design and illustration by Australian artists. And a formulation that is genuinely usable for the eczema-prone and sensitive-skin families the category currently under-serves.
The product met that brief, and the premium pricing reflects what it costs to actually deliver those standards rather than the standards we would like to claim. Our certifications page sets out every certification we hold, what it covers and what it does not.
The eczema-prone
families brief
One of the biggest worries with any nappy subscription is being stuck with a carton of the wrong size when baby has a growth spurt. It's a fair concern, and the reason a lot of parents stick with the supermarket despite the price difference.
We asked, early on, what the unmet need actually looked like. The answer, repeatedly, was eczema-prone families.
Eczema-prone skin is common in Australian babies and children. For families managing it, the change-table products are among the most consequential products in the home, because they touch the baby's skin most often. Six to ten times a day, every day, for years. A wipe formula that suits most parents may not suit the eczema-prone cohort. A nappy topsheet that is soft enough for most babies may not be soft enough for skin that is already sensitive.
Little Puggles is proudly partnering with the Eczema Association of Australasia. Every Little Puggles nappy is Dermatest® Sensitive Skin certified, and the wipes are recognised by EAA for suitability on eczema-prone skin, alongside the Safe Cosmetics Australia certifications on the formulation.
The EAA logo represents a brand partnership and product suitability assessment only, and does not constitute endorsement of any type.
As a mum, the clearest thing we could do was build the product so that eczema-prone families don't have to second-guess every change.
Emma
The eczema-prone framing isn't a marketing position. It is the set of families the product was designed to serve well, and everyone else benefits from a product that is good enough for the most sensitive users.
Where the product is made
Little Puggles nappies and nappy pants are designed in Bendigo and manufactured in China, at a partner factory that has been producing premium absorbent products for international markets for over a decade. The factory holds ISO 9001 certification with a scope that explicitly covers baby diapers, and the nappies are made in a factory with ISO 13485 certification. It is a serious facility for a serious product.
We say "manufactured in China" rather than dressing up the country of origin, because we don't think country of origin is the integrity question. The integrity question is whether the testing, the materials and the manufacturing process are good enough to stand behind. They are, and the certifications page sets out the evidence behind each one.
The wipes substrate is a bamboo fibre cloth. The packaging is designed in Bendigo, and the flora and fauna illustrations on every nappy size and across the wipes range are painted by Kate Smith, our dear friend and a local Bendigo artist. Each nappy size pairs one Australian native animal with one Australian native plant, and each pairing carries a short story for parents reading the back of the carton.
Bendigo
The whole company sits in Bendigo. The office is at 205 Murphy Street, East Bendigo. Customer service runs from there. Packaging coordination runs from there. The team meetings, the supplier calls and the Tuesday catch-ups all happen there.
Both Emma and Marcus are Bendigo-raised. They live twenty-five minutes out of town in Marong, with their temperamental beagle Hamish, who features in roughly eighty percent of household stories whether or not he wants to. They garden seriously, they share the cooking, and they have spent fifteen years building a life that is deliberately country-quiet. Louis is growing up in that life, not a different one.
Kate Smith paints from Bendigo. Kim runs the parent company from Bendigo. The team is small and the place is real, and it isn't a brand-aesthetic choice. It is where the family business has always operated.
Hospital partnership:
Gentle Beginnings
Gentle Beginnings will be our hospital programme. At any maternity unit that joins it, every new mum and dad goes home with a full carton of Size 1 nappies and a full carton of premium wipes, free, no strings. We are working through the partnership conversations now, and we will name partners on the programme page as each agreement signs.
The programme isn't an acquisition channel. It is a community-supply commitment. We have the supply infrastructure, we have fifteen years of relationships with hospital procurement teams through the parent company's clinical-supply work, and supporting Australian families at the most expensive moment of their lives is something a family business in Bendigo can actually do.
What Little Puggles isn't
Three things, briefly, because saying what we're not is sometimes clearer than saying what we are.
We aren't an eco-first brand. The product is a quality story, and we don't make environmental claims about it.
We aren't a medical device brand. The nappies are made in a factory with ISO 13485 certification, which is why we say exactly that rather than calling the product anything it isn't. The certification tells you about the facility. It does not give us a product claim, and we won't pretend otherwise.
We aren't a premmie brand. Premmie nappies are a different product category with different sizing, different absorbency requirements and different compliance standards. We don't make them. If your baby is in the premmie cohort, the dedicated products from clinical suppliers are the right fit.
What's next
We're launching with the Trial Pack, a small introductory pack designed to let parents test fit and feel before subscribing. Alongside it, the full nappy range in Sizes 1 to 5 in tape and Sizes 3 to 6 in pants, and the wipes range in a standard pouch and a travel pouch, each also sold as a six-pack. We're launching in partnership with EAA. We're launching small, with a small team, in our own way.
The longer arc is straightforward. Build the product range carefully. Add what serves families rather than what serves growth for its own sake. Listen to the eczema-prone families as the signal that matters most. Stay in Bendigo.
I want us to find our own way without too many people getting disappointed or annoyed with us.
Emma
That's the posture. Thanks for reading.
