Maarten: ‘Something snapped at the nine-month fair, everything always revolves around the moms’ | Family

Father Maarten Fest (40) has been attending the nine-month fair for years. First as a father of young children, and now children are a bit older (9 and 6) as founder of ‘daddy’s world‘, a blog for fathers. He notices the same thing every year. Something that makes him pretty pissed off. ,,Really almost everything at the fair is aimed at the mothers. The dads stay behind.”

That is also why he started his blog in 2015. The magazines on the shelves, the blogs, the various Facebook groups, forums; they all talk and write about ‘mom and child’. Whenever there is anything to do with babies, the mother is addressed, not the father, Fest says. ,,Take the Happy Angry, the gift package for new parents. on everything I love mombut almost never I love daddy.”

During the last edition of the nine-month fair, Fest was full. Something snapped as he stood in front of the booth of a major diaper brand. ,,There was the brand manager, a lady in her twenties, telling a story in which it was only about ‘mama this, mama that’. Not once did she mention the fathers. Moreover, the booth was full of photos of mothers with their child”. Fest got so pissed off that he couldn’t resist telling her the truth, he says. ,,’Yes, hello’ I said, ‘I am not standing here in front of Jan with the short last name. Where are the men represented? Do you think I’ve never changed a diaper?’ A girl like that has never touched a diaper herself. It was really the last straw for me.”

The brand manager reacted surprised and somewhat shocked, then started her story again, but she couldn’t manage to say ‘parents’ or ‘mom and dad’, Fest says with a sigh. Fortunately, he has seen the baby product landscape change somewhat in recent years. Especially the newer baby brands seem to be doing better. “Thule, a baby carrier brand, also explicitly focuses on the fathers in their marketing,” says Fest. “But in general, most brands continue to focus on the mother and if a father appears in an advertisement, it is often a nerd who doesn’t know it all that well when it comes to parenting.” When are we going to let go of the idea that the mother takes on the caring role, he wonders.

Naïf is such a relatively new brand, which has been focusing on the care of babies and children (and now adults) since 2013 and was founded by two fathers. A sustainable baby brand founded by two men, they must have fathers as an important target group, right? ,,I have to be honest: when we started nine years ago we said very explicitly that we only wanted to focus on young women between 20 and 45 years old. The man plays no role at all, we thought at the time,” says co-founder Jochem Hes (42). After all, his own wife does much more in raising children, he says. “My wife is always one step ahead of me when it comes to the ins and outs of our family.”

Nevertheless, Naïf has now made a conscious change and the mothers are no longer the only target group. For example, the skincare brand no longer speaks of young women and mothers in communication and marketing, but of young parents. Online data also showed that many men had already ordered the baby products, Hes says. And consumer studies by Naïf also clearly showed that fathers were strongly involved in the care of their child. Hes: ,,Fathers play a much bigger role in the family than we initially thought.”