Favourite brands 2022 - poll results

These polls represent the aggregate votes from the South African Cloth Nappy Users group polls that ran during the month of January 2023. It's not necessarily the best brands, but the voters' favourite ones.

Your favourite will depend on what you determine as most important as well as your lifestyle, so it may differ from these results. That is why we always recommend you try a variety of brands and types.

Lots of factors determine why each individual voted for a certain brand. For this reason we refined the results a little bit more using the extra information gathered in our polls.

This allowed us to break down the results by type to indicate the following:

- the overall favourite

- favourite for the power user category (defined as users with lots of brand exposure)

- favourite for users who regard price as the most important factor

- favourite for users who regard absorbency as the most important factor

- favourite for users who regard fit as the most important factor

Power users are identified as users with a wide range of experience based on a number of factors gathered from the questions on the polls.

Voters could vote for any brand of their choosing in each category, though only one vote per category was allowed. The administrators of the poll did not provide voters with a list of brands to choose from.

Some interesting demographic results from our polls to give further perspective on the voter base:

The most important factor overall in choosing a favourite nappy is still fit, followed by absorbency and lastly price. This is a marked difference from previous years where price was first or second priority. For newbies (defined as those who have been using cloth for 6 months or less), the three factors are almost of equal importance, though we can see more emphasis being placed on absorbency (again in contrast to previous years). In the case of power users (defined as those who have been using cloth for 2+ years) fit is clearly the most important factor with almost half of users ranking this the highest priority.

We see a clear shift overall to fit as most important priority for all users.

Pockets are still the most widely used type, with more than 90% having tried this type. There was an increase in exposure to AI2s specifically in 2022 and to a lesser degree to fitteds and SIOs.

Wool and AI2 remain the types that the smallest percentage of users have tried, most likely due to limited availability of brands locally within this type, though there has been a noticeable increase in exposure to AI2 in the last year (up from 28% in 2021 to 39% in 2022).

In 2022 we expanded our poll questions for night nappies in order to get a better quality result for favourite brands per type. For the first time we have results for favourite brands for the various type of covers for night time. Users were also able to vote for their favourite type of nappy for use outside the home (daycare, out & about and on holiday).

We hope the additional results are useful to you when deciding on a type or brand to add to your stash.

In 2020 we introduced a new category of Favourite Reseller to give recognition to those retailers that sell a variety of brands under one roof. Because as you know, variety is the spice of life.

In 2021 we added another new category - Favourite WAHM to celebrate our wonderful work-at-home cloth-nappy-making moms.

This year we decided to add a summary of the brands that made it to the most top 5 lists across the various categories (for this total we looked at the overall favourites in each category only, ie not the sub lists of favourites by fit, price etc). We counted each mention of a brand and aggregated the results to give an extra nod of recognition to those brands that scored consistently well across the various categories.

And last, but most definitely not least, we present the favourite brands in the various categories for 2022 as voted for by the South African Cloth Nappy Users. Many thanks to each & every one who took the time to vote!