Hollywood power couple Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard arrive in Waco with homegrown diaper brand

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WACO – Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard celebrated their new store just minutes from Beverly Hills on Tuesday.

No, not the Beverly Hills. The one outside of Waco.

The Hollywood power couple drew a small crowd to the south end of Waco when they opened the first manufacturing facility for their Hello Bello baby diaper brand.

Families flocked through huge double doors to view the bright purple, blue, and yellow painted building, an anomaly among Waco’s other industrial facilities. Locals were served sweet tea and Vitek’s BBQ from food trucks while the kids ran through a series of inflatables, taking turns with a mechanical bull. Several bands performed throughout the afternoon, one of which featured a cover of Hall & Oates’ “Sara Smile” as “Sara Marshall Smile,” a reference to Sarah Marshall Forgotten, the 2008 romantic comedy Bell starred in.

“You’ve all really opened your arms to some liberal clerks, and we thank you for that,” Shepard joked before cutting a giant ribbon of connected diapers to commemorate the opening of the 312,000 square foot facility.

According to the founders, the plant makes Hello Bello the only traditional diaper brand that makes its own diapers. According to the Waco Tribune-Herald, the company is receiving $ 2.5 million in tax incentives from the city of Waco and McLennan Counties tied to job creation and a minimum wage of $ 15 an hour.

The incentives require Hello Bello to create at least 110 jobs, but co-founder Sean Kane said he believes the site could eventually employ twice as many people.

Bell and Shepard founded the company in 2019 along with Co-CEOs Kane and Jay McGraw, son of TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw, and Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Pullen. Kane is best known for starting The Honest Co. with actress Jessica Alba. Both he and McGraw are also Native to Texas.

“I’ve grown up in Texas all my life … and it’s amazing to see the city explode,” McGraw said of Waco during the event.

The Hello Bello plant in Waco should be fully operational in the next few weeks.(Lola Gomez / photographer)

The plant opening is the latest in a series of investments in the Waco area in recent years. Long known as a university town equidistant from Dallas and Austin, the area has attracted investment from Dallas-based Topgolf Entertainment, additional investment to expand a nearby SpaceX facility, and a new Amazon shipping center, not to mention ongoing investments The Impact of Chip and Joanna Gaines’ Business.

“I think the world is watching Waco right now,” Waco Mayor Dillon Meek told employees, business partners and the community who gathered at the Hello Bello opening event.

“Between 2020 and 2021, we announced over 4 million square feet of new build in McLennan County – an all-time high for our region,” said Meek.

Hello Bello cited Waco’s proximity to raw materials and its centrally located dispatch centers in the area as reasons for choosing the city for its plant. It has invested around $ 31 million in the space and renovated an old Domtar Personal Care site.

The plant has already completed construction of one of its three production lines and expects the entire plant to be operational in the next “several weeks,” said Rusty Able, director of Hello Bello’s baby diaper program. Each of the three production lines is able to join the lining, wings and fastening strips together to produce 800 diapers per minute.

Hello Bello has a total of more than 160 employees, and some employees are moving from their home location in Los Angeles to the Waco facility and offices, Kane said.

Jeff Sutton, 39, and his family are doing some of these transplants. Sutton, who works in sales for Hello Bello, said he never saw himself living in Texas, but that the opportunity to help start a new business from scratch was tempting.

Like the other Kane company, the independent diaper maker takes a health and environmentally conscious approach to its branding and business operations. The Hello Bello product line also includes towels, toiletries, cleaning products and seasonal items.

Texas economist Ray Perryman said several factors contribute to Waco’s growth prospects, the first and most obvious being the Magnolia companies, founded by the Gaineses of HGTV’s Fixer Upper fame.

Magnolia at the Silos “has become a phenomenon and really turned Waco into a tourist destination,” he said.

A pre-pandemic study found Magnolia was a catalyst for a 44.3% increase in the relative importance of tourism to the area. More than two-thirds of direct spending comes from venues other than Magnolia, such as hotels and restaurants, Perryman said.

And in the Baylor-Downtown-Brazos River metropolitan area, significant new real estate developments are underway, including apartments, retail, restaurants, hotels and tourist attractions.

Waco has always had a manufacturing base, including one of the largest Mars candy factories in the U.S., and Baylor University’s student body has grown significantly in recent years to more than 20,000 students, Perryman said.

Retail reporter Maria Halkias contributed to this report.

The new factory of actors Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard for their baby diaper line called Hello Bello was officially opened in Waco on October 26, 2021.(Lola Gomez / photographer)
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