Our Story

Every great idea has an origin story. Here’s ours!

In December of 2014, I handmade a dress for my 6-year-old daughter Zia – a replica of a drawing she had done. After spending almost $100 in fabric and supplies and twelve hours across three days, sprinkled in between work-from-home obligations, I had Zia try the dress on to make sure it fit.

She exclaimed, “I’m wearing my imagination!” and didn’t want to take it off long enough for me to finish the collar and hem.

Her exclamation and excitement was one of the most winning parenting feelings I’ve ever experienced in my whole life. 
I figured if she was OK with it as-is, I was OK with it, too–not really expecting she’d wear it almost nonstop for the next six months.

Everywhere we went, Zia would receive compliments on her amazing rainbow dress. When people would ask where she got it she would proudly explain how she designed it with her mind, and that it was the only one in the whole world. After several months of this, my boyfriend Ken said, “You know, you’ve got something here–if we could help other parents and kids experience what you two have experienced with this dress, wouldn’t that be amazing?”

Initially, the idea scared me. It was so much work for just one dress, I couldn’t imagine doing this for multiple kids. After running some numbers we found that it wasn’t really feasible to do what I had done for Zia, at scale, in an ethical way but Ken found a way to simplify the concept. He said, “What if, instead of recreating the drawing, the kids actually wear their original drawing?” From there, the original idea was simplified into an easy process: 

Print--> Design--> Upload--> Wear!

It would be a print-at-home coloring sheet that could be designed any way a child can imagine, photographed with a smartphone, then uploaded to our website, then handmade in the USA, and sent back ready to wear!

We recruited our friends Ignazio (@menodesign) and Stephan (@stephanschier) to help us bring our idea to life. Ten months later, we had a proof-of-concept website and a local (Las Vegas) manufacturer who could make our orders if we provided print-ready files.

We launched on August 17, 2016 at 6:22am via a single tweet from my personal Twitter account, and later that same day we were blown away to discover, after our website crashed from traffic overload, TechCrunch had written an article about us!