When we started this blog our intention was to share our ideas on reducing waste, while saving money. One of the things we hear regularly from other parents is how expensive it can /will be to rear children. There is no doubt it can be, but it for sure doesn’t need to be at least during their younger years (0-6 or 7 years).

We started the Baby Market in November 2011 (along with a colleague from a previous job) when our first child was 8 months old after finding that there was no place to buy quality second hand baby goods in Cork. We couldn’t understand why this didn’t exist here already: Ireland was experiencing a baby boom, the recession was in full force, and much of the baby stuff we buy or receive is hardly used by the time it is outgrown.  To us, buying new things for our children felt obscenely unnecessary given the amount of these goods in circulation at any time.  I didn’t want my new baby’s miraculous arrival into this world to be accompanied by heaps of plastic junk, bouncer chairs, buggies, changing tables, rattles and other unnecessary things that only get in the way of enjoying your new baby, and end up cluttering your house and your life.  Give me a sling for carrying her and a few comfortable shirts that I could breastfeed in, and that’s all I wanted.

But after a few months, we did want a few things.  A cot would be nice, and maybe I did need a buggy.  A second car seat for the other car, some toys, books, clothes other than babygrows and maybe a bouncer after all.  We were lucky enough to get many of these things second hand from family.  But what did other people do?  And what would we do when we were done with these things? They took up a lot of room.  And they were still in perfect condition, even after 2 or 3 owners.

 

Around this time, I was at our local recycling centre and I took this picture of a skip completely filled with baby and children’s goods.  The staff there mentioned that this was a typical week’s worth of hard plastic recyclables.  I couldn’t believe my eyes!  How utterly wasteful for these large plastic objects, many of which appeared perfectly usable, to be dumped!  And when I inquired as to where the hard plastic recyclable waste stream was going, I was unable to get a direct answer…a question for another day.

New parents are so vulnerable to marketing.  Marketers will reprimand you for not considering the absolute best or safest products for our children. This leads us to purchase way more than we need, perhaps spending more than one can afford at a time budgets are being stretched by a new family member. Well meaning friends and family come showering us with gifts, all of which are beautiful and thoughtful, but perhaps not entirely necessary…I know that for every new item that comes into my possession, another one or even two items are manufactured. When my first was born, I desperately didn’t want her arrival to mean another 100 kilograms of plastic consumption per year added to the environment.  And the easiest way to try to battle this was to look for second hand items from day 1.

I felt it was URGENT and ESSENTIAL that an option to buy second hand should be available to all parents.  And so The Baby Market was born.

Shopping at the Baby Markets can save new parents hundreds of euros on the cost of baby and children’s goods while maintaining high quality standards.  Parents that need to declutter can rent a stall and sell on their used children’s items, thus clearing out their house and making back money.  The markets are financially beneficial for both buyers and sellers, while also tremendously benefiting the environment by providing an outlet for reusing good quality items rather than discarding them unnecessarily.

A third benefit from the markets has to do with empowering women, particularly stay at home mums, to start up their own businesses.  The Baby Markets are run as franchises, with each event run by an organiser with ties to the local community.  People contact us if interested in starting a new location and we provide materials and training, which along with their own skills and hard work will see them starting up a profitable business from the first event.  This allows women who are highly skilled and choosing to stay at home with their kids, to maintain and increase their business skills while working from home. It also offers a venue for a thriving selection of small home based businesses to sell their wares alongside the second hand goods.

Baby Markets are every 6 weeks in Cork, and every 2 months is Dublin, Limerick, Tralee, Ballinasloe, Navan, and Carlow.  See www.babymarket.ie or our Facebook page.