Princess Awesome helps girls twirl out of gender norms
Princess Awesome is part of a growing trend to push the boundaries of gender stereotypes. Started by two suburban moms, the company is giving girls' clothes a fashion makeover, reports CBS News correspondent Julianna Goldman.
Rebecca Melsky's daughter Eloise is a lover of pirates, spaceships and princesses, but one day she realized there weren't many clothing options with those themes from which her daughter could choose.
"'Why don't they make one of those cute dresses with a spaceship or a dinosaur on it? I mean like someone should do that. Maybe I should do that. How do I do that? Help me Eva.' And then that was it," Melsky said.
With help from a friend, Eva St. Clair, their business was born.
The goal is to embrace the girly and the twirly, but also spark imagination and innovate on what might be thought of as a stereotypical boyish items.
"You can like princesses and like pink and like dresses and also like dinosaurs," Melsky said. "We've heard from so many parents who have either made things like this themselves or their daughters wear Thomas the Train shirt with a tutu."
"[It's] a 'this and that' company, not a 'this or that,'" St. Clair added.
The production started out of St. Clair's basement and got legs from an old sewing machine she bought when she was 9 years old.
"We got pretty good at it. We could do four in an hour," St. Clair said.
They started with fabric featuring robots, the periodic table, Monet's water lilies and construction trucks.
The dresses flew off the shelf and they needed to step up their game, so they embarked on a Kickstarter campaign.
Within three days, they were half way to their goal of $35,000 and then the hits shot up. Mighty Girl, a company known for promoting empowering toys for girls, posted their Kickstarter and within four hours they exceed their goal.
"We hit this nerve of children, especially girls, can be who they want to be, which is feminine," St. Clair said.
Princess Awesome is part of a growing trend to push the boundaries of gender stereotypes, from clothing to engineering and sports. One popular spot, which ran in this year's Super Bowl and showcased what it means to "run like a girl," is proof of the zeitgeist.
"There is no need to segregate children's interests by gender," Rebecca Haines, author of "The Princess Problem," said.
She said companies like Princess Awesome help girls break the mold.
"If a girl has a dress that has trains on it, or cars on it, well maybe she will feel more confident if she wants to cross that artificial gender barrier in the toy store and say, 'Yeah, I would actually like a toy truck for my birthday," Haines said.
So now Eloise can play with the boys in a purple dress decorated with the pi symbol and twirl next to some pirate toys as a new kind of princess.
"'Princess' just connotes a huge amount of potential that every little girl has the potential to come into her own kingdom and rule it. That princess isn't the queen yet, she is not in charge, but she is learning," St. Clair said.
The Kickstarter campaign has raised $175,000 so far - money that will help them move from that basement to a factory operation in Chicago.