In the beginning ...

... Bill and Dave invented stuff in their garage

... Herb Kelleher drew a triangle on a cocktail napkin

... Howard Schultz found that people liked hanging out in Italian coffee bars

As for Kim and Jason Graham-Nye, they were living in Sydney, Australia, when their first child, a boy named Fynn, was born. They didn't want to throw his diapers into landfills. They discovered a small Tasmanian company with a better idea -- flushable, compostable diapers! -- and moved halfway round the world to Portland, Ore., to try to sell these new "green" diapers to American moms.

Improbably, their six-year-old startup company, gDiapers, is doing very well.

Sure, Procter & Gamble's Pampers and Kimberly-Clark's Huggies still dominate the diaper biz. But gDiapers has been growing by 50 percent a year (including during the recession), it's making money and the upstart brand has a growing army of fans -- 24,000 on Facebook alone -- who are helping to spread the word.

There are at least a couple of things to say about this.

First, never underestimate the power of story-telling in business. People want to do business with companies that are authentic.

Jason never tires of telling stories. He's got an entertaining blog and spends lots of time communicating with customers. "We grounded the business in this Australian idea called 'fair dinkum,' which means being genuine and real with everybody," Jason says.

Second, the disruptive power of the Internet is affecting even businesses like gDiapers which wouldn't seem to be web-friendly. Virtually all of the company's marketing unfolds (no pun intended) online, much it by word of mouth. What's more, roughly 60 percent of its diapers are sold online through companies like diapers.com, whose parent company Quidsi was acquired last fall for $545 million by Amazon. On the web, a little company can look like a big company.

Who would have guessed that people would buy diapers online? "You know, you need 5,000 diapers for your baby," Jason told me. "In the old days, I guess you'd go to Costco and load up." No more.

I caught up with Jason, who's your stereotypical Aussie -- outgoing, fun-loving, outdoorsy -- last week at the State of Green Business Forum in San Francisco. Like me, he's a marathon runner who favors Vibram "barefoot shoes" so we spent half our interview time talking about running. But once we got down to business, I was impressed to hear about the growth of gDiapers. (I wrote about the company for Fortune.com in 2006.)