When I had my first son, and was forced to think about a boys dress sense instead of just covering myself and my daughter head to toe in as many colours as possible, I realised how segregated children’s clothing was and how limited the options were for both girls and boys.
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Girls rarely had anything particularly inspiring to wear (unless you made up princess back stories like me, in which case a ninja scientist eco-warrior princess who plays chess against dragons is pretty damn inspiring) and boys aren’t allowed to be vibrant nor flamboyant.
Little kids like lots of things, everything is new and interesting and inspiring until us grownups get our jaded mitts on them and force them to be how we think society wants them to be.
Read that sentence again.
I’ll give you a second.
How ridiculous is that?!
We stifle they’re personality and creativity and uniqueness so they behave in a certain way and like certain things because we think that may be what society wants them to be.
That’s why I set up Gecko Clothing with my husband. We make funky, colourful clothes, designed to liberate our little people, that are ethically sourced, organic, and environmentally friendly.
We hope to be a part of the catalyst to make a social change, allowing not just our children but all of us, to be who we want to be, who we aspire to be.
We started off finding our feet by creating our own characters and designs – like Fred the Giraffe – and putting them on T-shirts:
We realised that this wouldn’t be enough to help drive us forwards to really make a change so we decided it was time expand our range. We realised that to make a difference we needed to get our message out to as many people as possible by creating a product that would be popular and would embody our ethics. So we formulated a plan to create dungarees and trousers (crawlers) using our own fabrics. This wasn’t a project that only we were passionate about so we asked our community what they wanted on their kids clothes.
They told us they wanted animals, science, and space, so this is what we did…
Nature Dungarees
Science is Universal and Space is Universal Trousers
Kit the Fox and The Universal Robot Tops
The feedback we’ve had is that parents want to buy these designs for both girls AND boys (hurrah!), so it looks like the plan is working. Now we need to just hit our crowdfunding target to get them made.
It’s a hard road, a long, winding, treacherous and tiring road but that’s a subject for a different post…
Help us get across this oh so bloody difficult road and into our journey for change. Actually that was a terrible metaphor (I just wanted to share the picture of the awesome road above) so instead I’ll say it straight.
We need your help.
We’re reaching the end of days for our Kickstarter campaign to bring these ethical unisex (and pretty awesome) dungarees and trousers into being. Please help us make this campaign successful and begin making a difference by supporting our project in any way you can. See the full Kickstarter and support us here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gecko-clothing/gecko-clothings-funkyethical-organic-and-unisex-du
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