One Year Later

This was Eva and me one year ago today.

In a blog post from that day, I wrote that I was

• excited
• nervous
• anxious
• more excited
• honored
• proud
• more nervous
• happy
• really excited

Why? Because one year ago today we launched our Kickstarter campaign.

After:

• Coming up with this idea for a company to make girls’ clothes with themes usually found only on boys’ clothes
• Sewing dresses by hand for almost a year
• Figuring out how to print our own designs on cotton jersey (something we had been told could not be done)
• Figuring out how to manufacture dresses in the U.S.

and

• Spending hours writing our Kickstarter page, filming and editing the video, and preparing the campaign

We were ready to launch. We were ready to take our baby, Princess Awesome, out into the world.

Our goal was aggressive: $35,000.  Up to that point, $35,465 was the most ever raised by a Childrenswear project. We had done the math; we knew how many backers we needed to bring in. We knew successful projects usually raise ⅓ of their funding in 3 days, and we knew how many backers we’d need in our first three days to meet that goal. We were cautiously optimistic that we could make our goal, but honestly, I was terrified that we’d get to $12,000 or $26,000 and just stall out.

In the week leading up to our Kickstarter I was the most stressed I’d ever been in my life (and still doing my best to teach my class of third graders and take care of my own kids on top of it). But Eva and I kept having the same conversation over and over again that ended with essentially this:

We’re going to give this our best shot. If we don’t make it, we’ll regroup and figure out something else. It’ll be ok.

And it turned out, it was.

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Over the next month, we’ll share with you some stories from our Kicktstarter, tips for launching your own, and our favorite press pieces we received during February 2015.