History
History
The first idea
In 1988 Gerhard Feyferlik –still a commercial attaché of the Austrian embassy – was transferred from Hungary to Canada. He moved to Toronto with his two small children and his wife, where Sigrid Feyferlik came across a modern cloth nappy as an alternative to traditional muslin nappies for the first time.
The first popolino stores
She was enthusiastic about the nature-friendly nappy with a contemporary pattern and wanted to bring the product to Austria. The young couple looked for suitable suppliers worldwide and found them in Japan, Canada and the USA. With no sales experience, but with a few lucky coincidences, in 1991, they opened the first two stores (“popolino Windelhäuser”) in Vienna and Graz.
First success
The feedback was overwhelming, the first supply immediately sold out, and many newspapers reported on the new eco-nappy. It almost seemed like everyone had been waiting for these modern cloth nappies. However, it soon became apparent that the imported products and the expensive freight also had high customs duty costs.
The conclusion was obvious: why not produce in Austria? A small sewing company near Melk (Lower Austria) supported the project, and soon more and more nappies were labelled “Made in Austria”. Fabrics and materials were switched from conventional quality to organic during that time.
Own production
They also began to produce in a Hungarian family business near the Austrian border to meet the increasing demand. In Tiszalök, a village with 6,000 inhabitants, they finally found the ideal production conditions. Shortly before, a large textile company had laid off more than 1,300 employees to relocate their production to Asia. A stroke of luck for popolini because the local specialists were already familiar with the production of baby clothes.
With the help of linguistic knowledge from their years in Budapest, the Feyferlik couple founded their production facility here. This simplified the cloth nappy production and enabled the company’s certified clothing line “iobio”.
Next generation
In May 2020, Sigrid and Gerhard Feyferlik passed on the family business to the second generation. Viktoria Feyferlik-Niermann and Carina Matzinger have a common goal: unite the tried and tested and the new toward a sustainable future for our children and their children.
„The fresh breeze is very supportive for our company.“
Gerhard Feyferlik
popolini today
Today our customers can find a complete range of sustainable baby items in the popolini stores. We offer fair and ecologically valuable articles and prioritize to support our customers. Because of this, the first generation popolini babies are using our nappies now for their children.
