Awesome Thoughts from our Blog
Here's Why Princess Awesome Exists
Over the next three weeks, while our Kickstarter is running, we'll be featuring guest posts and interviews with a variety of women around a variety of topics related to Princess Awesome.
To kick off our Guest Post Series, we present to you: Helen. She is four. Almost five. She is awesome. We sent her mom and dad some questions for her, she answered, and they wrote down what she said. Her parents are very honorable people so we are sure they did not fudge this interview at all - even though Helen's answers are so perfectly matched to Princess Awesome that we might as well take down our whole website and just put this up.
That's AWESOME!
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:
5, 4, 3, 2, 1.....BLASTOFF!
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:
Getting Closer
We’re getting closer.
Our fabric has been ordered, printed, and shipped. Our labels have been ordered, printed, and shipped. Our cut and sew contractor has cut and sewn our sample dresses. They are currently en route somewhere between New York City and Washington, D.C. (The pictures look amazing. Can I tell you how excited I am/we are to hold them in our hands??)
Fabric Printing Round 1 = SUCCESS!
We printed our first fabrics today! We printed our first fabrics today! We printed our first fabrics today!
It was a long, difficult road to get here, but we did it! We only printed a couple dozen yards for the first run of sample dresses, but now we know that we can and it will work and everything is good.
Princess Awesome vs. Princess Do-Nothing
I have to come clean about something. In the midst of working on that previous princess post, I decided to ask my daughter about princesses. I was hoping to get a 4-year-old’s version of our argument so we could say, “Look! See! We’re right!”
But I didn’t get that. In fact, she gave me literally the opposite of our argument. See for yourselves.
A Ruler By Any Other Name
It is a well-established fact that girls like to dress up as princesses.* Many of them even refer to themselves as princesses. As evidence, I submit this picture I took of the list of names chosen by the little girls in my son’s pre-K class:
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Fabric printing - worth the struggle? Heck yeah!
Today I had a conversation with a nine-year-old girl I know. This girl is smart. Really smart. She also wears really cute, interesting dresses on a fairly regular basis.
Today I asked this girl I know, “Would you wear a dress with pi on it?”
Her first response: “What?”
Me: “You know, pi? The symbol? [aside, she totally knows what pi is and could probably have recited 35 digits of it for me if I’d asked her] If there were a dress with pi on it, would you wear it?”
Her: “Oh, well, it would depend on what it looked like.”
Me: “What would make you want to wear it or not wear it?”
Her: “Well, it would have to look good.”
Me: “So, it would still have to be a cute dress for you to want to wear it?”
Her: “Yes. Now why are you asking me this?”
Meet B, An Awesome Princess!*
You’ve probably seen our little awesome Princess* B - she is the fabulous and adorable model for our Pirates, Starry Night, and Trucks - Kerpow! dresses.
Why is B one of our models? Because she is one of the girls who inspired us to start Princess Awesome - a girl full of imagination with a broad range of interests.
Change is in the Air
You know how when you learn a new word it suddenly seems like you’re hearing that word way more than you used to?
Well, it may just be that phenomenon at work here, but I don’t think so. Since Eva and I started Princess Awesome a little over a year ago, it seems like I’m learning about businesses with a similar bent all the time. People all over the place seem to be noticing that a lot of girls and a lot of girls’ interests are left out of the more mainstream clothing and toy business. We started Princess Awesome not because we think that girls shouldn’t like wearing pink or playing princess, but because we think that many girls can and, more importantly, already do enjoy those traditionally “girly” things and also other things. We saw an unmet need in the girls clothing market and decided to go after it.
About the Designer - Elishka Jepson
Elishka Jepson is a rocket scientist by day, graphic designer by night! She focuses on graphic and fabric design in her side business, Robyriker Designs. She especially loves to combine two of her passions, STEM and art, into fun, technical-themed designs. She lives in Tucson, AZ with her husband, two kids and herd of basset hounds. When she's not rocket science-ing, designing, or wrangling (human or puppy) kids, she enjoys reading, sewing, and enjoying the wonderful desert she lives in!
Pink
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: