The Kuddle Up Baby Blanket: A Product Critique On The Most Iconic Hospital Blanket
Babies. They bring tears of joy from families and friends. They bring tears of their own. They are forces to reckon with. As a market, the pediatrics industry is one of the most profitable consumer market sectors worth $16.78 Billion today. As a society, babies are pivotal for continuation and for growth. Babies truly do make the world go ‘round.
Babies are photographed hundreds of times. Going through a photo album, an online gallery, or family photo collection, it can be challenging to distinguish a child’s age. The visual discrepancy from two weeks old to fourteen weeks old can be difficult to tell. It can be particularly difficult for relatives who are not as close as the parents or relatives who aren’t already parents to distinguish between a baby’s age. However, there is one key distinguishing feature that reveals the age of a baby: a baby blanket. Not any personalized or age signifying baby blanket. Not even a family specific baby blanket passed down generation to generation. But, rather, the most important baby blanket is the first one a baby would ever know and the first blanket they will go home in. The most recognizable baby accessory is the pink and blue striped baby blanket given in the hospital, which is known as the Kuddle Up.
The history of this striped baby blanket goes back to the middle of America and the middle of the twentieth century. The Kuddle Up flannel blanket was founded by the Medline company in Mundelein, Illinois in the year 1950 (Dodge). Medline was once known as the A.L. Mills Company and had headquarters in Chicago where they invented green surgical scrubs.
A.L. Mills Company rose to popularity during World War II when the demand for medical supplies. However, as stated on the company website, the A.L Mills Company continued to grow and prosper well past WWII. Today, “Medline Industries, Inc. stands as a fourth generation, family-owned company offering over 350,000 medical products and clinical solutions to healthcare facilities around the world (Our History).” Despite its humble roots in Chicago, Medline has grown to become one of the most powerful and influential medical design companies in the nation.
The iconic Kuddle Up blanket was designed by the Medline Corporation to be a part of their new medical supply product line. Medline always sought to be at the cutting edge of technology and cultural shits, and the invention of the Kuddle Up was in response to a change in the way women were giving birth. In an analysis of the Kuddle Up, Lisa Selin Davis of Quartz notes that “In 1950, 88% of all births were in hospitals (the figure is now 99%). Just 10 years earlier, only 56% of births took place there; the rest were mostly at home or in birthing centers (Davis).” This was due in part to a rising population of the Baby Boomers, and “the advent of pain medication, the rise of comprehensive health insurance in the 1910s (later, of course, defeated) and the establishment of the American Board of Obstetricians and Gynecology in 1930s (Campbell-Dollaghan).” The middle of the twentieth century brought about a number of pivotal changes in the societal expectations of childbirth, and the medical advances of the field.
Prior to the invention of the Kuddle Up, children were often wrapped in a dull beige cloth. While the cloth got the job of swaddling a newborn baby done, it failed to inspire a sense of joy and warmth in families. In keeping up with the changes of society being more welcoming to hospital childbirth, the Mills company polled the women of the Medline office to offer advice and criticism on what changes could be made to make the baby receiving blanket more appealing. Calling upon the expertise of mechanical and pattern designers and after producing a number of iterations, the white blanket striped in blue and pink was the design in which they landed upon. The beloved design has been used for decades ever since, and you may even be able to look back in your own family photo albums to see your parents in this classic blanket.
Eagerly awaiting parents spend hundreds of dollars and hours preparing a home for a baby’s arrival. Furthermore, throughout a child’s life, parents will put every financial expense on the line to provide what is best for their family. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to a new parent that their child feels comfortable and supported from the very moment they are delivered in a hospital. This need for comfort is translated in the quality and the materials of a hospital baby blanket. Medline markets the Kuddle Up blankets as being a combination of flannel, and all-cotton. Medline states that these blankets are “So soft, warm and fluffy, they work wonderfully as an attractive crib or receiving blankets (Kuddle-Up Flannel Baby Blankets).” The quality of the blanket served as a great incentive for hospitals to trust the Medline Company in their production of baby receiving blankets.
Furthermore, another incentive for hospitals to use the same blanket is for a sense of uniformity amongst all newborns. It is an easy visual cue that a baby was just born in the hospital and may require medical attention, rather than a baby who is wrapped in a family blanket visiting another hospital patient (Dodge). This sense of uniformity has been pivotal to streamlining and improving the quality of American child care.
While the uniformity and popularity of the design has been pivotal to changing the American pediatrics field, the Kuddle Up is now a universal design. Today, 99% of newborns in the United States are wrapped in the same blanket. Outside of the United States, the design can be seen in Pakistan and China (Davis). In a 2011 article about the iconic and ubiquitous design, NPR received over 200 images of newborn babies. Please find the publish picture below:
Despite the sheer prominence of the Kuddle Up design, not every new parent finds the same love for the design. Many criticize the design for being too generic, too sterile, and too uncomfortable. These criticisms have caught the attention of Medline who continues to make strides in promising the most comfortable design (Hsu). One interviewer said that the Kuddle Up design incites a feeling of insecurity and pessimism. Julie Marsh spent the first week of her child’s life in a pediatric ward following complications in delivery. After a nerve-wrecking week, she eventually hated the blanket she saw everywhere. As reported by NPR, Marsh today says that the blanket “stirs mixed emotions — overwhelming joy, anxiety, frustration, a sense of incarceration, but mostly I recall the precious bond with a tiny, fragile, lucid human who became the center of my world (Hsu).” While iconic designs serve as a sense of comfort and familiarity for many, it is important to recognize that there could easily be negative connotations with such familiar designs, only to be compounded by how familiar and pervasive a design may be.
The pink and blue stripes of the Kuddle Up blankets have long been revered as a gender neutral and familiar design. It is welcoming for newborns to be presented to their family for the first time. Further, it is neutral in presenting twins or triplets. However, in an age where gender has become a more open conversation and less parents present their children in the stereotypical gendered colors, the Kuddle Up colored stripes may have lost their charm with new parents. As Hsu reported in 2011, there is a sense of antiquity associated with the Kuddle Up blanket. While some may equat antiquity with nostalgia and warmth, others criticise the design for being outdated. Moving forward, this should be a lead concern for Medline as they seek to continue production.
When Medline invented the Kuddle Up blanket in 1950, there was no way of knowing how iconic and pervasive their invention was to become. After 70 years, tens of millions of families have seen the Kuddle Up blanket as a visual marker of being inviting, warm, comforting, and familiar. The colored pink and blue striped pattern goes down in history with some of the most iconic logos of the past century. It is easily recognizable and completely dominates the market with no competing company designs on the market today. The popularity of the Kuddle Up is due to a number of facts, some of which being it’s cheap cost, gender neutral colored design, and comfort. Furthermore, the everseen design offers a sense of security as it is a uniform design that protects newborns from going unseen from medical attention in the hospital. While the gendered design has received some criticism recently, there are certainly changes that could be made moving forward. Childcare is one of the most promising and stable consumer sectors. It is impossible to foresee a future without children in it. For this reason, the highly profitable Kuddle Up blanket has a promising future for continuing its iconic design in the coming decades to come.
Sources
Campbell-Dollaghan, Kelsey. “Who Designed the Blanket That Practically Every Newborn
Gets Wrapped In?” Gizmodo, Gizmodo, 27 Oct. 2014,gizmodo.com/who-
designed-the-blanket-that-practically-every-newborn-1651287496.
Davis, Lisa Selin. “Why Every Newborn You See on Facebook Is Wrapped in the Same
Baby Blanket.” Quartz, Quartz, 7 June 2019,qz.com/280475/why-every-newborn-
you-see-on-facebook-is-wrapped-in-the-same-baby-blanket/.
Dodge, John. “Why You See Newborns Wrapped In The Same Baby Blanket.”
CBS Chicago, CBS Chicago, 24 Oct. 2014,chicago.cbslocal.com/2014/10/24/why-
you-seen-newborns-wrapped-in-the-same-baby-blanket/.
Hsu, Andrea. “Oh, Baby! Overjoyed With Blanket Photos.” NPR, NPR, 22 July 2011,
www.npr.org/blogs/babyproject/2011/07/22/138557751/oh-baby-overjoyed-
with-blanket-photos.
“Kuddle-Up Flannel Baby Blankets.” Medline Industries, Inc.,
www.medline.com/product/Kuddle-Up-Flannel-Baby-Blankets/Baby-
Blankets/Z05-PF02620.
“Our History.” Medline, 4 Oct. 2019, www.medline.com/pages/about-us/our-history/.
