Little Unicorn

Little Unicorn's first art department was a group of college students. When Matthew Huff started the baby blanket company in 2014, he recruited graphic design students from Utah State University to create its prints, and the Logan company still describes the patterns on its swaddles as hand painted. He launched the brand that September at a trade show in Las Vegas.

The idea came from a gap. In NetSuite's account, Huff looked at the baby goods business in 2014 and saw plenty of new brands but little new design, with the same blue and pink patterns parents had grown up with. "We just try to have fun on the creative side and create these prints with something original from the start so that the end product will have that handmade feel," Huff said. "It was the right guess, you could say."

The products are simple on purpose. In 2018 everything came in one of five fabrics, from cotton muslin to percale, and NetSuite reported that third parties test all of it against regulatory standards. The swaddles are 47 inches square and, the product page says, get softer with every wash. The original quilt is four layers of muslin and goes in the washing machine, which matters more to a new parent than any print.

Growth was fast and not tidy. NetSuite reported that the company grew exponentially its first year, and that at one point 60 percent of its inventory was out of stock. Some wholesale orders still arrived by fax.

The fix was software and a deadline. In 2017 the company built a wholesale website in 21 days, just in time to show it to buyers at the same Las Vegas show where the brand had launched three years earlier. By 2018 it was shipping about 7,500 orders a month from four warehouses, in California, Tennessee, Canada and China.

The lineup now runs past blankets to crib sheets, bibs, sleep bags and a toddler hooded towel with pockets for small hands. The prints change with the seasons, from cats and cauldrons in fall to a holiday pattern called Holiday Haul.

The honest note is about where things happen. Little Unicorn draws its prints and runs the business in Logan, but as of 2018 none of its four warehouses was in Utah, and one was in China. The blankets are a Cache Valley idea that ships from somewhere else.

The address on every page of the site is 15 South Main Street in downtown Logan. That is the same town where Huff found his first designers, back when they were still students.