2007 was a funny old year work-wise. After Laurie was born just before Christmas 2006 I began to pop into the office in January, baby in Close carrier of course. Claire had everything well under control and I was enjoying taking a little time out with my new baby.

It was a great chance to thoroughly test the Close carrier personally, as before then we'd had to satisfy ourselves with carrying dolls in it (and how stupid did we feel carrying dolls around the carpark of an industrial estate!) or the odd exciting chance to carry other people's babies. So we knew it worked really well, but this was the time when I could truly say yes you can carry your baby around in this all day, I know because I do, every day. It gave me the chance to explore the strengths and limits of the carrier and to figure out lots of tips for customers.

This was the first time I'd had a really great carrier to use with one of my babies. With my first and second I'd craved the chance to carry them around lots and get on with my life but didn't really have the product to do it, the carriers I had were okay outdoors shopping etc, but didn't really cut it inside when I wanted to wash up for instance (baby was just too far out in front of me and I couldn't reach or see what I was doing properly). With Laurie I could do pretty much anything around the house and I found myself wishing I'd had this opportunity with my older boys.

This was also the first baby I'd had knowing Claire; my others were born before I met her. Even though this was my 3rd baby, I value Claire's knowledge and instinct for great parenting techniques so much that I loved having her around to both validate my choices in the way I parent (it's amazing how many other parents, friends and family, other mums on the school run, strangers at bus stops etc can make little comments about the baby getting too used to being carried around!) and to ask advice from. She's brilliant, funny and inspiring...

...can I tell you about the time we went to the Harrogate trade show in March 2007? Laurie was just 3 months old, in his carseat in the van. It's quite a drive to Harrogate, and on the way there we stopped a couple of times so I could breastfeed Laurie, but on the way back 3 days later we just wanted to get home. So when he began to cry Claire said ‘why don't you just feed him from there?' ‘What do you mean?' I asked, ‘how can I feed him without stopping?' ‘Just lean over, pull up your t-shirt and feed him!' came the reply. Well I'm not one to turn down a challenge, so that's exactly what I did, and it did the trick. Probably gave a couple of passing lorry drivers a view they hadn't seen before on the motorway too. Obviously not recommending this to anyone else as it's possibly not legal, but it got us home quicker!

It was just after Harrogate that I knew I had to get back into the office properly, and not just hang around in there chatting whilst feeding and changing nappies. Claire was about to leave for her incredible trip with her girls and would be away for 4 months putting me back in charge, so I had to get my head around everything. I slowly settled back in and once Claire had left time whizzed by. It was strange her not being there after working together every day for 3 years. Most obviously so in times of crisis; for example the delivery of all the packaging boxes for the Close carrier. We'd ordered 5000, and yes 5000 is a lot of boxes and no I hadn't really put much thought yet into how much room they would take up or where they would go. So when they arrived on 15 pallets that needed a fork lift truck to unload them and we had an upstairs office with insufficient storage and no fork lift truck nor driver... the thing I wanted to do was run around, panic and say ‘Claire what on earth are we going to do?!!!!' The thing I had to do when people just looked at me expectantly was... okay yes still panic... but acknowledge that I had to figure out a solution (which I did, thank you ‘Matthews Haulage' just down the road for having storage facilities, fork lift truck drivers and great patience) and email Claire later after the crisis was over. I believe she was diving at the time... or was she on the beach, can't remember...

2007 was a quiet year in other ways, it was time spent preparing products, packaging and trying to estimate the effect on sales that Claire's appearance in ‘Bringing up Baby' on Channel 4 would have. We obviously got that one wrong, as once the show started the orders for the carriers exceeded anything we'd expected, we had shops calling us asking to stock the carrier as ‘it's all anyone's asking for!' Within just a few weeks we'd sold out of most colours and then spent the next month trying to figure out how to satisfy orders with what we had and get new stock in quicker.

At the same time Hester began working on designing new nappies and went out to visit Tony's factory in China (which incidentally Claire had visited while she was travelling). She stayed there for over 2 weeks to work on perfecting the design and built up a really good working relationship with the people there. And luckily my baby was still young enough to be main tester for new nappies too whilst design was in progress. As usual with new products it took some time to finalise the design, trial at length and then come up with the packaging and other paraphernalia, but finally the Pop-in was launched at The Baby Show in Excel in February 2008 to great interest and fantastic feedback, so we think Hester's hard work in 2007 was very worthwhile!