Spilled Milk x noissue

Parenthood is undeniably messy and challenging—and messy again, especially when it’s your first time doing it. Nothing goes right, and everything you do seems wrong. That’s how it was for the team behind Spilled Milk, who were mothers first and founders second.

As they navigated through the highs and lows of parenthood, they acquired a lot of knowledge and shared it first with friends and family; later on, they decided to create Spilled Milk. It became their mission to help parents, new and not, navigate through the early stages of parenthood by offering trustworthy, quality-made, and stylish brands and products that they themselves have used, and making them available and accessible to all.

Detail has always been important for Spilled Milk—from ensuring that the clothes they curate are not only made with quality materials but also fit comfortably and beautifully on their adorable customers, to choosing the packaging that would represent the brand from there on out. So they chose noissue to create a packaging suite that has all the qualities they’re looking for: sustainable, quality-made, and has low MOQs. Read on to learn more!

Tell us a bit about your brand!

My cousin, Sarah and I launched the website a little over a year ago. We both had our first babies during the pandemic and had a lot of free time on our hands to research all things baby! Sarah actually originally launched the brand with a Diaper Emergency Kit that she had gifted to all of her friends who were having babies. It was a really cute kit that contained all of the diapering essentials in case you were ever in a pinch and needed a spare outfit or diaper. Hence the name, 'Spilled Milk'. I had just quit my corporate job in the fashion world after 10 years and offered to help her launch the kit.

As new parents, we felt overwhelmed by the endless options and decisions surrounding cribs, diapers, and baby clothes. So we decided to evolve Spilled Milk to provide a thoughtfully curated selection of our favorite mom and baby products, alongside trusted brands we rely on for our own children. "Perfectly Imperfect" is our parenting mantra -- it helps us get through our daily lives both personally and professionally and encompasses the parenting world so well.

Tell us about the design for your packaging and how you’re using them?

Since we ship baby clothes, we have started out using different sized poly bags - so that way if someone orders one pair of socks, we aren't shipping in a giant bag and we don't have to waste any more plastic than we have to. Our design on these is simple, featuring our primary stacked logo in our signature lush color.

Our custom tissue paper is a repeat pattern of our monogram logo also in that pretty bluey green lush color on a white ground. Feels classic and timeless, while still having a subtle branding element. The custom cards include one of our marketing motto's "Love just got real", which for us was when we had our first babies. Everything got real, REAL quick. And to tie it all together, we went with the custom rectangular sticker in our swaddle/lush color combo from our palette. It's our version of black and white!

We do offer gift wrap for a small fee -- this includes noissue's custom drawstring bags with our monogram logo on one side and "a gift for you" on the other. Great that this is also another sustainable element of our packaging and can be repurposed for something else.

Last holiday, we were invited to do our very 1st pop-up shop for Small Business Saturday! We thought it would be fun to give away custom tote bags instead of regular shoppers so that way our customer's could reuse them for grocery shopping, toy collection, laundry, etc.! Luckily, we have some leftovers which we will use again this year for some new pop-up shop opportunities we are exploring.

What made noissue a good fit for your packaging?

One of the things that sets us apart is that we love to create our own marketing content. We felt it was important to really showcase the attention to detail that goes into the designs of these baby products even at the tiniest level. The amount of time and effort these designers have put into their product assortments is truly a work of art, especially in a world of fast fashion these days.

So when it came to branding, we partnered with a local creative agency, Buck Bradley, who really brought Spilled Milk's brand identity to life. We knew that when deciding on packaging for the brand, we didn't want to sacrifice quality for quantity since we were just starting out and couldn't afford high minimums other businesses required.

noissue's low minimums, quality materials (we ordered the sample pack before we purchased anything else) and design templates made it so easy for beginners like us! Not to mention they offer free design help after you submit your order to ensure it's 100% right before going to print. This took a lot of the stress out for us and made it a very seamless process.