The Story Behind Picture This Clothing

One Winter break not long ago, I made a dress for my daughter Zia, based off of a drawing she had done. Zia loved it and it has since been a big hit with everyone that’s seen it, and could often be quoted saying, “I’m wearing my imagination!”

Due to the positive response and requests from Zia’s friends and classmates to also ‘wear their imagination’, friends Ken (@kenfinney), Igi (@menodesign), Stephan (@stephanschier) and I chatted about how to turn this concept into something where kids everywhere could have fun with hands-on drawing and coloring, and then see their imaginative artwork come to life in wearable fashion form.

We looked into creating custom sewn dresses like Zia’s original on a mass scale, but among other issues it turned out it would be really expensive and time consuming to try to pattern and recreate custom dresses in the same way. Zia’s original dress as pictured above cost +$72 in fabric and 12+ hours of time for me to pattern and sew. In short — expensive!
We wanted something that could be accessible to a lot kids, of a broad spectrum of social and economic status, and also be an easily scalable business model. So with a little more brainstorming we came up with our concept for Picture This Clothing.

We’ve created a simple, printable coloring book style template, where kids can doodle, stick stickers, paste pictures, and do any other kind of fun hands-on creative arts and crafts things they can dream up. Parents take a photo of the artwork (easiest with a smartphone), place the order from our site, and we send back a custom cut-and-sewn article of clothing.