Awesome Thoughts from our Blog

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.

Once upon a time, a girl named Princess Isabella lived in the kingdom of Alai. She is a Princess and she is seventeen years old. One fine day, she wanted to go on a trip. She’s going to South America. She went to the airport and got on the Royalty Airplane, that is only for Princesses.

There was a little girl named Jilly and Jilly's brother was named Nicky. Nicky and Jilly's mom and dad took Jilly and Nicky to the zoo. They saw a lion and horse. Then when they went home, they watched TV!

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.

A few weeks ago, we had the pleasure of speaking with Leslie Coles, Co-Founder & Executive Director of The Moms as Mentors® Project, a non-profit dedicated to giving moms the tools and opportunities to be mentors in their daughters’ daily lives, ultimately helping their girls to grow into confident and influential women. Moms as Mentors has recently launched a crowdfunding campaign, and we are proud to support their campaign (our coloring book is one of their rewards!).

Read Leslie's guest post about her organization and why it's important and support their campaign today!. Side note: we did not ask her to write such a lovely intro about us! We were totally surprised and totally flattered.

I was shopping at the Value Village one afternoon when my son picked up a baby doll and started carrying it around. I bought it for him, thinking it would be fun and possibly even helpful to have him play with it before his sister arrived a few months later.

Ha.

The doll spent the next 15 months as a bludgeon. Picked up by one foot, whirled around a few times, and then brought down solidly on the head of one’s brother, it was a far better weapon than most other toys - hard enough to produce a solid whack, but too soft to cause actual harm. I finally hid it in the stuffed animals the day it went flying through the air and nearly took out a lamp.

The VERY FIRST time my (Rebecca’s) daughter wore her Airplanes Busy Dress. She did the following:

• Ate a egg and cheese bagel sandwich (messy)
• Had her first egg cream with her grandpa (more messy, but delicious)

Rebecca used to teach at a wonderful school in Washington, DC. The oldest daughter of the science teacher at said wonderful school wrote an essay for her AP English class about math and science and girls and Princess Awesome. We were completely surprised and honored. We asked if we could share the essay with you, here on this blog. Thank you, Adina, for allowing us to share this fantastic essay, and thank you for being awesome!

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The Danger of a Single Story
by Adina Schwartz

When I was little I played with Barbies and Polly Pockets, I had long hair, and I wore nothing but dresses until the first grade. I was the quintessential “girl.” I also had science as a large part of my childhood.

JJ Abrams, can we please have a Storm Trooper Ballet in the next film? 

This fantastic dress is from Kohls, by Star Wars and Lucasfilm Ltd. Huzzah!!!  And to repeat the usual question - do they come in adult sizes??

Last week was the first time my daughter’s new Cars Busy Dress went through the wash. I was in my sons’ room putting their laundry away. The Busy Dress was near the bottom of the basket underneath their clothes. I was about to walk out of their room to go to hers when my eye caught sight of the car. Instinctively, I reached in the basket and pulled the dress out, all ready to put it away in my sons’ dresser - because it was blue and had a car on it.

What the...what?? What just happened? I helped MAKE that dress, and I made the mistake of assuming that because it was blue with cars, it belonged in my sons’ room.

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!