Welcome to My Crib

At Bel Bambini, a nursery boutique in West Hollywood, Calif., a transparent acrylic crib rests prominently in the center of the showroom. It’s the Vetro, a $4,500 ghost of a baby bed, which the store started stocking in 2011. Since then, Bel Bambini has sold more than 350 of them to wealthy parents—or their interior designers—most of whom saw it in tabloids or on reality TV after celebrities such as Robert Downey Jr., Beyoncé, and Kim Kardashian procured one for their offspring. (With the exception of Kardashian, the stars paid full price.) “You can always tell when a new celebrity gets it,” says Ahzahdeh Neshat, the store’s manager. “Suddenly, all these customers call and say, ‘I want the clear crib.’ ”

The crib is made by Nursery Works, a high-end brand owned by L.A.-based Million Dollar Baby. The company, despite its name, has manufactured mostly inexpensive children’s furnishings since 1990, when co-founder Daniel Fong began making the Jenny Lind, a classic $99 crib with a frame of carved wooden spindles. “That was the most popular style at the time,” Fong says, so he needed to find a way to differentiate: Instead of shipping premade models from East Asia, MDB imported the wooden parts and assembled them to U.S. safety standards using better-quality domestic hardware and mattresses. Then he sold his Chinese-American hybrids to specialty stores. “I could tell the consumer, ‘This crib has the same hardware as Child Craft and Simmons, but it costs half the price,’ ” he says. “That’s my story.”