To describe her life and business, Ashley Trotter, 30, often uses the word flow. And that’s not just because she’s in the diaper business. She talks about raw goods flow, production flow and positive energy flow. She rarely mentions cash flow, even though it’s currently good. That’s because starting Baby Greens Diaper Company seven years ago and nurturing it into the five-employee operation it is today has rarely been about creating a cash machine. It has, however, involved a lot of thinking about making many disparate parts of a machine move together in an orderly fashion. “If you truly believe and put your heart into what you’re doing it will be what you want it to be,” she says, and then

And, until last year, she did. Trotter birthed Baby Greens Diaper Co. shortly after her son Kai was born in 2001. She and her then-husband Marc worked as co-managers of a small farm in Swannanoa, where they lived in a cabin. They got their first set of cloth diapers for Kai as a gift. When Trotter saw that her son would quickly outgrow the diapers, she pulled out her sewing machine. “I thought, wouldn’t it be a great thing if I could make one diaper that could fit my child until he’s potty-trained?” She had studied costume design at the University of South Carolina in her hometown, Columbia, and then sculpture at UNCA where she focused on textiles. “I’m a functional artist,” she says. “Diapers are even more functional than clothing.” 

The Baby Greens diaper prototypes took shape on her kitchen table. Trotter chose a fleece made from hemp and organic cotton, a combination known for its anti-microbial and absorbent properties. The hemp-cotton blend is four times more absorbent than regular cotton, she says, and has the added bonus of being environmentally friendly. It takes a minimal amount of time and space to grow hemp fibers, compared to other plant fibers (though it’s illegal to do so in the U.S.), and growing organic cotton requires no pesticides. After ten prototypes, Trotter found the design she uses today. The Growing Greens diaper has an adjustable snap system that allows the diaper to fit the child’s “rise,” a measurement from front to back through the legs, and the fit of her waist as she grows. Jennnifer Jones-Wickcliffe, a friend of Trotter’s from Columbia who now lives in Asheville, says her daughter’s tush was one of the first to be covered in a Baby Greens diaper. “I love their simplicity,” she says. Jones-Wickcliffe has used the diapers for all three of her children because they’re easier on the kids’ skin and on her pocketbook.

As word of Trotter’s diapers grew, more people wanted them, and not just friends. In October 2002, Trotter landed her first retail account with Asheville-based online retailer Little Sprouts. Lori Hemphill, Little Sprouts’ former owner and now Trotter’s assistant, says Trotter’s hemp-cotton blend was unlike anything else she’d seen in the cloth diaper industry. The diapers were “immediately popular,” she says, which was beneficial for both businesses. 

Little Sprouts launched everything, Trotter says. Within a few months, her diapers were picked up by Sunflower Babies, also an Asheville-based online retailer, and in 2003, her business was profiled by E-Pregnancy, an online magazine. Suddenly, she had orders to fill. She enrolled in a Mountain Microenterprise course (now Mountain BizWorks) and continued to make diapers in her kitchen and backyard—which took forever because she was laying out fabric, cutting it and attaching snaps by hand.   

In the beginning, Trotter borrowed $2,500 from Mountain Microenterprise to buy what she describes as a fancy machine for a home sewer—a move that turned out to be a mistake. She needed something bigger, and when Trotter walked into a large building owned by local contract seamstress Joyce Roberts, she knew she’d found it. Roberts and her daughters had five industrial sewing machines, a huge cutting table, cutting machines and “kick presses” for snaps. “It was the easier way,” Trotter says. That’s when she became obsessed with industrial machinery. Using Roberts’ industrial cutting knives meant cutting 300 diapers at a time instead of 12. A cloth drill meant no longer marking diapers by hand for snap placement and the kick press snap machine was lightning fast. 

Over time, she realized she didn’t need someone else’s machinery but rather some industrial machinery of her own. When the owners of the Swannanoa farm gave her a warehouse space to use, she made the difficult break from Roberts’ contract shop and bought a number of industrial sewing machines. For the first time, Trotter says, she started taking the business completely seriously. Her husband let go of his small glassblowing business and took on most of the childcare so she could work full time. “That was the biggest challenge,” Jones-Wickcliffe remembers, listening to her friend during this rocky period. “Raising a child at the same time you’re raising a business. I know sometimes Ashley was ready to throw in the towel.”

By 2004, Trotter was the breadwinner for her family and put in 16 hours a day managing five seamstresses on a contract production schedule. In addition to their own products, they made diapers from hemp, synthetics and organic cotton—for three of Baby Greens’ competitors. “The money was great,” Trotter says. “But I never saw my son, never hung out with Marc, never saw my friends. I wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t happy. I realized I had to just focus on doing one thing.”

While she went back to focusing on just one thing business-wise, many things needed attention at a personal level—starting with her hair. Until the end of 2005, Trotter wore her dark hair in dreadlocks down to her calves. “I realized that in this business, unfortunately, no matter how you present yourself from the inside, people look at you from the outside,” Trotter says. She cut off the dreads and felt ten pounds lighter but wanted to feel lighter all over. “Back then I was this intense, angry, obsessed person,” she says. “I freaked out a lot.” 

She started running two miles every morning, a daily meditation. She needed to improve her marriage, but she wasn’t sure how. “I didn’t realize that having a better relationship meant separating,” she says, which the couple did in 2007. After the breakup, she moved into a house in Black Mountain, then to a house in Woodfin, not far from where she leased a 4,000-square-foot warehouse space for Baby Greens. “I needed to be more professional,” she says. “Now everything could be in one place. The past year and half has been full throttle. Everything I worked so hard for has finally become real.”   
One reality is that Trotter can now buy her hemp-cotton blend fabric directly from the manufacturer in China, instead of going through a Colorado distributor as she had before. She imports approximately 10,000 yards per year. Trotter says China is one of the few places where producing the fabric is both legal and cost-efficient. For customers who would like more local materials, Trotter now sells cloth products—including baby wipes—in organic cotton, grown in Texas, then milled and finished in Hickory, North Carolina. Her product line includes cleansers for the wipes and diapers.

After she moved to the Woodfin warehouse, Trotter realized she shouldn’t micromanage. As people were sewing, cutting and putting on snaps, she’d jump in to make sure everything ran smoothly. “I created something wonderful with Baby Greens, but I sacrificed a lot. I didn’t have a life,” she says. This year, for the first time, she left her business for two weeks and went to St. Croix. “I just had to have faith that the business would run itself,” Trotter says. “Not only did it run itself, but it ran better.” While she’s not offering employees the money a large corporation might, she does think the atmosphere is warmer and more familial than at other places. Currently, Baby Greens has five employees and Trotter plans to add two more.

Trotter estimates that, in 2009, Baby Greens will sell about 24,000 diapers. The company has more than 100 retail accounts, and it distributes in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. For a business that got its start with online retailers, it seems odd that Baby Greens doesn’t have its own website. “We’ve had seven developed and didn’t launch one,” Trotter says. In some cases she didn’t like the designs, or the business grew so quickly that the content was no longer accurate. At this point, a website might give her more business than she could manage. “Everyone kept saying, how will people find you? I don’t know how they find us, but they do,” Trotter says. “If we had a website I couldn’t handle it right now. We’ve been backordered for years.” 

Trotter declined to disclose her revenues and didn’t seem all too keen to talk about financing either (though she mentioned that the $5,000 she borrowed to make improvements in her warehouse has been repaid.) So how does she define her company’s success? “It’s about creating something that is positive for everyone involved,” she says, “from me to my son to my partner to my employees to my assistant to my customers to the children who wear the diapers.” 

Now, after all those years putting in long hours, she wants to enjoy her business and the good things a healthy cash flow can provide. She credits her life partner of the past year, Chris Maness, with this shift in perspective. “I’d just gone through this huge personal transformation and when I told him about my dreams for the business, he said, ‘So what’s stopping you? You can do anything.’” Maness, an artist, jeweler and entrepreneur with several small businesses himself, says all he did was cheerlead (and help with repairs in the warehouse). “I’ve never met anyone as dedicated,” he says. “Ashley was raising a child and putting everything else into the business. Sometimes when you’re caught up in something, you need someone to help you create moments when you can step back and reorganize.” 

Trotter says she won’t run Baby Greens forever. “The definition of an entrepreneur isn’t just a business owner. It’s the ability to create a business and then move on and create another,” she says. Trotter says she will probably sell the business to someone who can take it to the next level sometime in the next couple years. In the meantime, she’ll focus on one business goal at a time. All of them flow into the ultimate goal of happiness. “Nothing happens the way you think it’s going to happen, particularly the wonderful things,” she says.