Awesome Thoughts from our Blog

I was scared. Feminism in the business world wasn’t mainstream yet. I didn’t want to be perceived as a crazy man basher. I also didn’t know whether there was any money in this. And launching yet another business (my fourth), and this time, exclusively for women, was risky. Was I willing to sink more money into a new business? A new website? A new suite of offerings? Would anyone want what I was offering? Maybe there was a reason it didn’t exist.

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.

I am an aircraft mechanic. A literal, if not so glamorous, Rosie the Riveter. After WWII, the men came back from the war, and most women left their jobs in factories and hangars and went back home to their more traditional duties as wives and mothers. Even today, in 2017, less than 3% of all aircraft mechanics are women.

There are so few of us that most companies do not even offer uniforms in women’s sizes. They call a 36”x32” unisex and send us on our way in boxy shirts and ill-fitting pants. It is ingrained in our cultural presumptions that mechanics are male. Time and again, flight crews are surprised and sometimes confused when they call for maintenance and I show up, but always interested to see that I know what I’m doing!

[An excerpt:]

So, thank you. Thank you so much for giving my daughter the clothes that she wants. Thank you for showing her that it's cool to be interested in pirates and dinosaurs and ninjas and fire trucks and trains. Thank you for giving her the tools that she needs to show her enthusiasm for those things to everyone. You've made her childhood, and you came along at just the right time to do it. I just know that she's going to have a blast growing up along with your company, and I can't thank you enough for letting me and my family be part of the beginning of all of that. Keep being awesome and keep letting my princess be fearless.

Debuting April 6!

Clang! Clang! Clang! It's a five-alarm dress! Red fire engines and black rescue ladders head off to fight explosive bursts of fire. Little heroines who rush to save the day will love this bright, twirly, 100% cotton dress. Future fire fighters can store treasures in the hidden pockets while out on missions.  

This month, Bella traveled to the Maryland State Capitol in Annapolis to share her winning poem with First Lady Yumi Hogan at the Student Art Exhibition. We are so proud to reprint it here! Congratulations, Bella!

To children - small children in particular - most of daily life is full of little mysteries. We can encourage a curious mindset by acting like a mystery writer. Instead of answering all their questions outright, we can give them that same slow drip of clues, guiding them through mysteries slowly and irresistibly before we reveal the solution - keeping their curiosity piqued.

Playing sports is a sure-fire way to help girls develop their superpowers of strength, confidence, and leadership. Through sport, we learn how to collaborate, how to compete, and how to make progress over time through consistent effort. Sport has the added benefit of teaching girls to respect and value their bodies. Through sport, girls learn they can be strong and that strength is a good thing.

We've teamed up with Bethany at Math Geek Mama to create a fabulous, fun, and easy craft for Pi Day!

Pi-lentines!

It’s the two-year anniversary of our Kickstarter finish, and we are so happy to be here, doing this work we love that our backers made possible - making awesome clothes for awesome girls. Here’s our quick update from the past year.

Children often feel powerless (and sometimes they complain because of it). As parents we can show them that they always have the power to take some action, even if that action is acceptance. What can we do to help them regain a sense of control? We can help them learn to reframe their perspective as choice-based. We can show them that they can choose how to react to the problems they face by taking action or by letting it go.

More than any other measure, our passion for what we’re doing, combined with the determination to get better at it, predicts whether we will succeed. If we want to empower our children to achieve their goals, we can do two things: help them discover what they’re interested in, and teach them the self-regulation needed to stick with it.