Amby Baby's History of Quality

Ambrose Hooi, the Australian inventor of the Amby Baby Motion Bed, shares insights on the quality and manufacturing process of Amby Baby products.

“Believe it or not, choosing a bed for your newborn may be one of the most important decisions you, as a parent, will make. In the first 12 months or so of life, a baby spends a considerable time in bed. It is therefore imperative that his ‘home’ for these most critical months should be comfortable, safe and have some resemblance to the maternal womb.

The Amby Baby Hammock Natural Motion Bed was created by me for my daughter, now 18 years old and in her second year at a top Australian University. This world wide patented product has graced maternity hospitals, childcare centers and tens of thousands of homes world wide for the past 18 years. The Amby is the original and safest hammock in the market today.

The Amby Baby Hammock paved the way for hammock use for babies in Western Culture. Today the Amby Baby Hammock Natural Motion baby Bed is a household name in Australia, the USA, Canada, Europe and Japan.

As with any ‘good thing’ there will be, in time, copies. We are now finding more varieties of baby hammocks in the market place – cheaper and inferior in quality, as to copy our Amby completely would involve a violation of our patents.

The Amby Baby Hammock Natural Motion Baby Bed has evolved over the past 18 years to be the safest, prettiest and best designed baby hammock there is. In an endeavor to keep it that way, we have built our own factory to manufacture the Amby Baby Hammock exclusively.

Amby Baby Hammock Shanghai Ltd is a new factory situated in Shanghai, one of China’s premier cities.

Amby Baby Hammock Shanghai Co Ltd

• All our buildings are clean, air conditioned and well insulated.
• Our team of loyal employees are adults (we do not employ children) and are paid well above the State minimum wage.
• They are provided with two free meals a day – lunch and dinner.
• We have virtually no turnover of staff in the past 5 years.
• All our machines and equipment are less than 5 years old.
• The steel for our frames are the best rolled steel available.
• Our powder coating is lead free.
• The fabrics that we use for the hammock and hammock accessories are the best quality fabric available.
• Our raw cotton hammock is made from un-dyed natural cotton.

Quality control is maintained constantly at every level of production. We do not and have never compromised on safety and quality. That is why hospitals and child care centers worldwide used the Amby Baby Hammock exclusively even though there are cheaper hammocks in the market.

When you use the Amby Baby Hammock, you can be assured that you have purchased the original. The best designed and the best quality and by far the safest hammock that has ever been invented for your precious baby.”

- Ambrose Hooi

The Baby Hammock Story

Ambrose Hooi’s daughter Joanna was born in November 1988. The proverbial ‘perfect’ baby, feeding and sleeping well, she was a joy to behold. At about 4 weeks, however, things began to change, with the onset of colic, an often difficult to understand syndrome. She soon became unsettled and restless. As with most colicky babies, sleeping and feeding became a ‘chore’ rather than a ‘joy’.

Hooi: I pondered over the question of ‘a cure’ for all this colic! What does a newborn do most of the time? Sleep? Yes, apart from feeding and the other natural things that all good babies do, the newborn sleeps or tries to, most of the time. So he spends most of his early life lying down, somewhere.

Hooi started asking questions: Could the logical answer to the problem then, be as simple as a bed? Perhaps some kind of a ‘nest’ that replicates the comfort and security of the maternal womb may not be too far fetched an idea for a solution! After all, why do babies curl up in a corner of a cot to sleep?

Could a non-traditional sleep environment make babies more comfortable?

With more research into the subject, it became increasingly evident to Hooi that there are many cultures that use an alternative bed for their babies. In many countries, a little hammock of one kind or another is used exclusively for their newborns. In these societies, the hammock as a baby bed can be found everywhere, suspended from beams in corridors and doorways, from the branches of shady old trees and on the front or back of mothers working in the fields. “Every time you look in on these ‘hammock’ babies,” Hooi says, “they are asleep, blissfully!”

Hooi: If you examine the make up and structure of a hammock, you are reminded of some sort of an external womb, a kind of a ‘pouch’ that has many ingredients of the maternal womb. In kangaroos and other marsupials, the pouch is both an external and internal womb where the young is nurtured until they are old enough to fend for themselves. This is the supreme place of security, a place where they can simply concentrate on the joys of feeding, sleeping and growing.

The answer: A sleep environment resembling the maternal womb

According to Hooi, the human baby, amongst the most helpless at birth, must be given an environment that has some resemblance to the maternal womb. To cope with the outside world in their first few months of ‘external’ existence, Hooi reasons that as he spends most of his time in bed, he should have a bed that simulates the conditions of the maternal womb - a bed that can provide spatial restrictions or enclosure, tactile touch and rhythmic movements.

Hooi: The conventional baby bed that is available is therefore nowhere near suitable. They are, very simply, adult beds made in miniature and ‘babied’ up with frills. The only problem here is that babies are not miniature adults! They are initially frail and helpless and they need a lot of nurturing and sleep. Their bed must therefore be a place of utmost comfort and security, a bed that is at once soothing and stimulating.

In current debates and discussions on the topic of sleep or the lack of, much has been said about the methods- Ferber, controlled crying, attaching a crib to the parental bed, medication etc etc.

Hooi: We impose this so called ‘expert advice’ on our babies in the hope that one of them might work, when in fact a bit of common sense and lateral thinking might point us in the right direction. It just might be possible that the root of most sleeping problems in a normal infant (i.e. not hungry, wet, sick, colicky or reflux) could be put down to one very simple thing, his bed. He could well be looking, even craving for something that he can easily and naturally identify with.

Hooi reasons that forcing a baby to sleep in a still, flat, open bassinet or crib is akin to asking us to sleep on floorboards after a lifetime on a mattress. “Surely it is not too difficult for us adults,” Hooi says, “to understand that babies, like us, will prefer to sleep in something that they are familiar with and accustomed to. After all, they have just spent their whole life in the womb!”.