why soté baby exists

Dear Parent,

I started soté baby with a simple belief: nature should be the default for babies. Your baby's most-worn essential — the one thing on their skin, day and night — should be made from plants, not plastic.

how i got here

I didn't come to this the usual way.  I began my career in global public health and then spent nearly 15 years in plastic recycling — I built one of the only recycling facilities in the world to tackle dirty plastic bags on an industrial scale.  To say it was hard is an understatement, and it taught me a humbling truth: only about 5% of what we throw away gets recycled.

we're making way more plastic than we can ever recycle.

what changed my mind

And then in 2024, researchers published something that shocked me: plastics contain more than 16,000 known chemicals, and about a quarter of them are considered hazardous.  Scientists are now finding microplastics nearly everywhere they look — including in the placenta, before a baby is even born.

Most of us — myself included — simply never knew.  And once I knew, I couldn't unknow it.  I realized the most meaningful thing I can do isn't recycling plastic at the end of its life but replacing it and toxic chemicals at the start — beginning with the one thing a baby wears around the clock.

what we made

So that's what soté baby is: a tree-free diaper made mostly from bamboo with every ingredient disclosed, honestly, including the parts that aren't natural yet.

just a better option, and the full information to choose it.

our name

soté comes from the old expression "salt of the earth" — the kind of person who is fundamentally good, honest, hardworking, and dependable. That's the standard we hold ourselves to. Nothing flashy, nothing hidden — just something you can count on, night after night.

You're doing a wonderful job. I hope soté makes one small corner of parenting feel lighter.

With care,

Mimi

founder, soté baby