May 2024: Price Changes for CLAPA’s Feeding Equipment
May 2024: Price Changes for CLAPA’s Feeding Equipment
CLAPA is the only UK provider of specialist feeding equipment for babies born with a cleft. We send out over 10,000 bottles and teats to families and NHS hospitals each year, including around 730 free ‘Welcome Packs’ for new families.
We sell this equipment in our website shop, and this income helps to fund free-of-charge equipment, postage and packing, storage, staff, and everything else needed to keep a service like this running. As a small charity, we aren’t able to access the pricing deals or equipment available to large companies. We process, pack, label and post each and every parcel ourselves from our small office in Bethnal Green.
Each year, we review the prices of feeding equipment in our shop to ensure this service remains sustainable. We have not raised our prices since 2020, mindful of the difficult times we all found ourselves in. Instead, we took careful measures to cut costs wherever possible while doing all we could to minimise the impact on the cleft community. However, since then, the cost of delivering this service has risen by 15%.
We are therefore raising the prices of our feeding equipment by an average of 10% to help cover these costs. This will help us to ensure this service stays sustainable, especially in such an uncertain financial climate.
Price Updates
| Item | Old Price | New Price |
| MAM Bottles | £5.00 | £5.50 |
| MAM Teats | £3.50 | £3.90 |
| Dr Browns Bottles and Teats (twin pack) | £25.00 | £27.00 |
| Dr Browns Teats (2 pack) | £5.00 | £5.50 |
We are also increasing the price of Royal Mail First Class Postage from £4.30 to £4.50 to reflect Royal Mail’s own price changes. CLAPA will continue to cover postage costs for orders of more than £25 worth of feeding equipment for UK customers.
Due to Brexit-related price increases, we are raising the prices of all international post (including to the Republic of Ireland) to a flat rate of £30 for parcels with up to £30 worth of items. For EU countries, this will include delivery duty pre-paid on packages, which we hope will reduce the number of international packages returned to us due to unpaid duty. To send a small international order valued at just £24, CLAPA pays around £29 in postage (£20.50 for delivery plus £8.50 customs duties), so the charge of £30 will help to cover this as well as a small contribution to our time and equipment. For parcels valued at over £30, customers will be charged £30 postage at the checkout and will then be sent a payment link to cover the costs of any additional taxes. We encourage customers in the Republic of Ireland to make use of Parcel Motels, which are typically much cheaper.
If you are concerned about paying for feeding equipment for your baby, please ask your Cleft Nurse to contact us on your behalf. CLAPA provides extra free-of-charge feeding equipment to many families in need each year, and we would be more than happy to help you. Once we have received a request from your Cleft Nurse, we will send whatever equipment is needed, no questions asked.
If you are able to help CLAPA continue to provide free-of-charge equipment to families in need, please consider making a donation either through our website donation page or when you next buy feeding equipment. Your contributions help us to keep prices low for those who may struggle to pay otherwise.
