Using Niche Sites to Find Better Brands

Not sure how to find more ethical or sustainable brands? Considering using niche sites that fill a particular need or market to a specific demographic to focus on the brands that are best for you and your family.

When just about anyone finds out that I make concerted efforts to make most purchases from socially responsible brands, they almost always ask how I find the brands. How do I know what’s sustainable? How do I know what brands to buy? How do I find new brands?

I’m always learning and discovering new brands, so it’s definitely a work-in-progress. But there are a few ways I’ve found that work well for me. As one option, I head to niche websites that target a specific market or consumer. These sites tend to be a bit easier to navigate when I know what type of product I’m looking for but am not exactly sure what brand or iteration I’d like to buy.

The sites tend to group products by more focused categories, have more manageable filters for specific brands, and sometimes even have categories like “natural and organic” that can be starting points for narrowing down my search.

Diapers.com is one of these sites that I’ve found helpful when looking for products for my kids. While the site certainly has a heavy focus on infants and toddlers, they offer all sorts of products for my preschool age boys as well.

They have a host of Melissa and Doug toys, which are so much simpler than many other toys and offer great opportunities for the boys to explore their imaginations. Just a couple days ago, my boys were both making me cookies in their stand mixer, baking them in our cabinet, and serving them to me while I made their lunch.

They have all sorts of natural and more organic bath and body products for kids and babies as well. To make it easier to find these products, shoppers can filter for “natural and organic”. I tend to use this filter to narrow down my search. From here, I read product descriptions and ingredients or even check out more details on the brand’s website before buying. After a bit of research, I’ve come to know which brands I like and prefer.

Diapers.com also has a Natural Cleaning Guide, which highlights many of their cleaner products made with fewer toxins and more kid-friendly ingredients. This is really helpful when navigating a world of household products that often don’t require ingredients on their packaging or provide much guidance about what is good or bad and why.

Whether it be related to clothes, shampoo and soap, cleaning products or diapers, niche sites like Diapers.com generally have done a whole lot of research on the products they’re selling. They can provide guides, like this gift guide for moms, or guides about specific types of products, like the Natural Cleaning Guide I mentioned, for a consumer in search of a particular type of product.

As interest in more sustainable and natural products increases, I like that we can find more and more of these products at mainstream retailers like Diapers.com. It’s important to me that I buy good products for my boys, but I also appreciate that I can order things from my house and receive them in two days (with a reasonable minimum purchase amount) from a reputable retailer.

Niche sites aren’t the only way I find out about new brands, and I’ll certainly continue to share with you more ways I find more sustainable alternatives. But capitalizing on research and categorization that these types of retailers have already done saves me lots of time in my search for the right products for our family.

Thanks to Diapers.com for sponsoring this post.