Awesome Thoughts from our Blog
"I'm actually giving the talk in this room" and other things I say as a female neuroscientist
Over the next few 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.
Meet Bridget. She is one of my (Rebecca's) closest friends in the world. Bridget has a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently in medical school at NYU. She also routinely wears beautiful clothes with flowers, lace, and pastel colors. I asked her if she'd write a short piece for us (emphasis on the "short" since, like I said, she's currently in med school and has a toddler running around). Here's what she had to say.
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Several years ago, while working in a neuroscience research lab at Columbia University, I traveled to Sweden to give a funding pitch to R&D executives at AstraZeneca. As I walked toward the conference room, a secretary tapped me on the shoulder and pointed me in a different direction - “Miss, the nursing conference is down that hallway.”
"Are you a hobbyist or a business owner?" - The Questions Mom-Business-Owners Get
Over the next few 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.
Eva has four kids. I (Rebecca) have two. I'm a full-time teacher. Eva does website management on top of being home with two of her kids during the day. Starting Princess Awesome has involved a lot of creative time management and more screen time for my kids than I'd like to admit. Please meet, Kelly. She's my cousin and right around when Eva and I officially incorporated Princess Awesome, she started her own photography business. We asked her to tell us about her experience with starting a new business, being a mom, and all that both of those entail for her. Thank you, Kelly. And, if you live in the New Hampshire/Boston area, check out her company: www.wrjphotographyllc.com
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“Are you a hobbyist or business owner?”
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.