How We Got Started

In the spring of 2013, Rebecca went to buy her daughter pajamas from a big mainstream store. She bought a few sets of cute, pastel pajamas with ice cream cones and hearts from the girls' section and a few sets of red and blue pajamas with robots and rocket ships from the boys' section.

On her way out, she passed the girls' section and glanced through the dresses, the only article of clothing other than pajamas that her daughter would wear at that time. "It's too bad," she thought, "that there are no dresses with robots on them, because she would totally wear one. Or a dress with a truck. Or a dinosaur. Or an airplane. Or a pirate. Or a train. But those don't exist."

With no more than a brief conversation with Eva about the sad state of the thematic divide between girls' and boys' clothes, Princess Awesome was born. And we got to work. (For more on our origin story read here.)

In the fall of 2013, we created our first test batch of dresses in Eva's basement on a 1948 Singer sewing machine. Within three weeks, we had sold 75% of our original stock and made more in batches over the course of the following year, all of which also sold out within a few weeks of production.

With six children between the two of us, two full time jobs - one out-of-the-home and one in-the-home - we realized that making things by hand was unsustainable. We began looking into factory production and quickly realized that the start-up capital we needed was beyond what we could finance ourselves. We decided to launch a Kickstarter, and on February 3, 2015, Princess Awesome set out to raise $35,000 on the crowdfunding platform.

After a post from A Mighty Girl helped spread the word about Princess Awesome far and wide, we concluded our campaign on March 4, 2015, having raised over $215,000.

We completed our first run of factory production in the summer of 2015 and opened our online store in August 2015.

Over the next few years, we introduced many more themes, styles, and products to the Princess Awesome collection and even heeded the request of many of our customers and brought out adult sizing. By early 2019 we knew we were ready to tackle the other side of the childrens’ clothing department and Boy Wonder was born.

Still Want to Know More?

Over the years, some pretty cool news outlets have been interested in writing about our little company. Check out some our favorites. (Googling “Princess Awesome Kickstarter” will also yield a lot of results. :) )