Business Spotlight: Skin in the Game

As the name implies, Super Duper Diaper Doo is a fun business on a serious mission.

The owners run it on the side of their day jobs, and it almost has a personality all its own.

The objective: to sooth and protect the skin of babies, specifically their rump.

“We’ve taken care of a lot of baby butts over the years,” says Rocky Levell, who handles the company’s marketing.

Levell and Diaper Doo partner John Sherman work for Integrity Pharmacy by day, and by night, with silent partner Rick Williams, they wage the war on diaper rash. The product, a gel packaged in tubes, pumps and jars, is now treating its third generation of bums, since making its way to the Ozarks in the 1970s.

Legendary formula
How the gel was developed is somewhat of an urban legend.

The story starts with Springfield pediatricians James Sammon and Bernard Griesemer. They ran into a Swedish surgeon who developed a cream for treating lesions post surgically and tried the mixture on diaper rashes.

“They brought the formula back, and it worked great,” says Sherwood, who in the late ’70s owned a couple of pharmacies.

Unable to patent the mix because it contained common ingredients, the formula was shared with pharmacies and pediatricians, and word began to spread. The key ingredient, the partners say, was urea, a substance found naturally in the skin that absorbs and retains water.

Soon, mixing of the ingredients in stainless steel vats was taking place in pharmacies across the city. Doctors were sending patients to “pick up some diaper doo,” Sherwood says. “Everybody was using it because it was effective.”

One thing it lacked was a name. But that was short-lived.

“Over a period of time, it was self-named,” Levell says. “That’s just super” was the mantra at pharmacy counter pickups.

Super Duper Diaper Doo had a ring to it.

Once that stuck, Sherwood jumped at the chance of obtaining a trademark for the name.

“This is pre-Internet. I telephoned the patent and trademark office,” he says.

Without the help of an attorney, Sherwood filled out the proper forms and waited for months before he was informed there was an error in the paperwork. He’d need to refile. In the meantime, though, someone else beat him to the name. He opted for Doctor’s Best, but didn’t let go of the Super Duper Diaper Doo name.

Almost 15 years later, Sherwood bought the trademark for “several thousand dollars,” and in the late 1990s formed Primrose Investments LLC with Levell and Williams to house the Super Duper Diaper Doo brand.

‘Baby shower marketing’
The serious side of the business is in its clientele: pharmacists, doctors and, more importantly, mothers.

“It just gets down to what mom wants,” Levell says.

Mostly, that’s the Diaper Doo tube variety, of which Sherwood says they sell nearly 10,000 units each month. The company contracts with Renfrow Industries in Ozark for manufacturing and product fulfillment.

Co-owner Lance Renfrow says the arrangement started in 2011 with fulfillment and manufacturing was strategically added a year later.

“We took on the fulfillment with the intention of manufacturing it when they ran out of current stock,” Renfrow says, noting his company manufactures product for almost a dozen other companies, but Diaper Doo is its only fulfillment client.

Located on the Ozark square, the Renfrow family operates the Replenish boutique storefront and manufacturing space behind it. With tanks ranging from 5 gallons to 250 gallons, Renfrow says the company blends and mixes soaps, lotions, gels – “and diaper ointment. It’s kind of its own, unique thing.”

He says the shop stocks about three weeks’ worth of Diaper Doo inventory, and he runs production every couple of weeks. After packaging, the majority of product is mailed to distributors, as well as individual Internet orders and Sam’s Club online.

For distribution, Sherwood says a half-dozen firms, such as divisions of McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health, then move the product to pharmacies and retailers in the region. Locally, Diaper Doo is available at Price Cutter stores and George’s Pharmacy.

Diaper Doo also is used by nurses in CoxHealth’s neonatal intensive care unit and by runners and cyclists to prevent and treat chaffing.

The products have been put in gift bags for Multiple Sclerosis Society bike rides and shipped to the military to treat soldiers’ burned scalps, aka “helmet head.”

In some ways, product placement and availability harkens back to the earlier days. Customers often have to ask pharmacists for Diaper Doo because without competitive branding and corporate distribution channels, the product doesn’t get prominent shelf positioning.

“It’s a big, complicated world. We’re up there against Johnson & Johnson and Kimberly-Clark, who take water and oil and invest $10 million to market it and it flies off the shelf,” Sherwood says of corporate planogram strategies for where and how to arrange related products on retail shelves and displays.

“We do it a different way,” Levell adds, noting they’ve sidestepped the advertising push and pull in favor of being patient for the product to sell itself. “That’s our business philosophy.”

Instead, the company relies on “baby shower marketing,” he says.

The brand does have a mascot, Star Man, developed by local marketing guru Dennis Marlin. The diaper-sporting superhero “fights evil diaper rash,” according to the packaging, while flexing his muscles in victory.

The shoestring budget is intentional, and at this phase, the partners don’t think they’ve got it in them for a run to grow the brand.

“If we donated more time, it might be bigger,” Sherwood says, declining to disclose sales.

They have an idea to pass it on to a young entrepreneur.

“We’re listening,” he adds.