our story

My daughter is a little obsessed with pandas.

For her birthday last year, I bought her a toy panda family - parents and four kids. They came sweetly dressed in classic Victorian-era clothes.

The first thing my daughter did was take the clothes off the pandas. I suppose that makes sense, since, as we all know, Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing. Tiny as they are, the clothes were promptly lost to the Charybdis that is the toy chaos of my basement. So the pandas went for months and months without any clothes and we just played with them au naturel.

With their clothes lost, we couldn’t tell Mommy Panda or Daddy Panda apart - they’re identical without clothes on. Same thing for Sister and Brother Pandas. That meant that all of their activities and roles were perfectly equalized, since the characters could stand in for each other with no perceivable difference.

When adults speak to children, unless they are fairly well-acquainted, they tend to look for clues to the child’s interests on their clothing. How many times have I said to little boys, “Wow! A dinosaur shirt! You must like dinosaurs”? But I don’t often say that to girls. Why? Because very few items of girls’ clothing feature dinosaurs - or pretty much anything else other than flowers and cute animals.

But now we have collected anecdotal data about the kinds of conversations adults have with girls who are wearing Princess Awesome dresses. They're different: 

When my daughter was 2, she was given a big, fuzzy, neon pink box of generic princess dress-up clothes. She adored it. She (and practically every little friend who came over) wore the dresses constantly. My initial reaction to all this: Dread. Frustration. Fear.

What was my brave, smart little girl going to turn into? Was I a bad feminist for letting her prance around the house in these frilly, sparkly dresses? After all, it wasn’t too long ago that I had promised I’d never buy my daughter anything pink.

Then, one day, while listening to her pretend to drop her kids off at school and then go to work while wearing her pink princess dress and tiara, I had a realization. I harbored beliefs about what my daughter could or could not do while wearing a princess dress - but she did not.

If you are raising your daughter to be an independent, confident woman, chances are you’ve given thought to the clothes she wears - how to reconcile your feminist values with what stores are offering, much of which promotes a traditional view of girlhood. It makes helping girls learn to dress themselves a tricky and often daunting undertaking.  

On top of what we want our daughters to wear, there’s the equally important consideration of what they want to wear. Before my daughter was born, I swore I would never buy her anything pink. My daughter’s favorite color now? Pink.  A friend of mine was excited to have a girl to dress up in twirly dresses and lacy headbands. At age 2, her daughter is already completely uninterested in anything remotely “girly.”

So how do you clothe a budding feminist? Start with these five principles.

Little known fact: planning a successful crowdfunding campaign is like planning a wedding. It’s a huge amount of work beforehand, a lot of happiness and stress while it’s happening, and at its conclusion, you end up with a commitment and a responsibility to make good on promises you proclaimed publicly. Plus, if you’re like me, you’ll end up with a partner whom you start to call your “business wife.”

So if you want to plan a successful campaign, think about planning a terrific wedding. This analogy will help dispel some myths that can sink your campaign from day one.

Here is an abbreviated history of the Busy Dress:

Rebecca: What if we make a dress with a car and a road on it?

Eva: YES, and what if the car is on a string so the girl can drive it around on the dress and play with the dress?

Rebecca: YES, and we could do other vehicles, too! Like trains and airplanes!

We’ve already discussed why we called our company “princess” - so what about the awesome? We didn’t choose awesome out of nowhere, or because it sounded great with “Princess,” or even because everyone we met told us our idea was awesome (which they did, tee hee, all modesty aside).

Awesome has become an exclamation akin to “Cool!,” “Wow!,” “That’s terrific!”, and certainly that is the way we hope people will express themselves when they see our adorable dresses. We are offering something no one has seen before, and that they can’t find anywhere else. Listen in on parents describing the reactions people have when they see kids wearing the pi dress: 

After months of preparations and work, we launched our Kickstarter today.

When my students or my children get overwhelmed I always remind them to use their words to say how they're feeling. So here are some of the words we have to describe how we're feeling:

Before my daughter was born, my husband and I made the bold statement that we were not going to buy her any pink clothing. If someone gave us a gift, we said, fine. We won’t return it, but we won’t buy her anything pink ourselves. 

If someone had pressed us at the time, we don’t think we could have given a coherent, articulate answer. We probably would have spouted a mish-mosh of the following:

Superman has one. Batman has one. And we have one, too. 

It started back in April of 2013. I stopped in a big chain store because my daughter, E, then almost three, needed new pajamas. And I did what I always did when buying her pajamas. First I went to the girls section and picked out a few sets that had some assortment of cute, pastel colors with ice cream cones, hearts, and butterflies. Then I walked to the other side of the store and bought her a few pairs from the boys section - red ones with dinosaurs, dark blue ones with rocket ships and planets, and an orange and blue set with construction equipment.