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Walk into a baby shower almost anywhere in the US, and the first thing you’ll see is an eruption of pink or blue. Not surprisingly, the kids clothing section reflects that same rigid interpretation of gender.
As expecting queer parents, we did things like requesting gender neutral clothing, staying away from sharing their genders, talking to our friends and family about why we wanted to push against the traditional all in an effort to give our kids the opportunity to start at a place of neutrality.
The fact that clothing for toddlers is still broken into boys and girls sections is kind of ridiculous, because they are essentially the same size and shape. Why can’t a girl wear a t-shirt with dinosaurs? Why can’t a boy wear a t-shirt with unicorns? Society is imprinting thoughts about gender from a very young age. So much so despite the fact that Kelly and I make conscious efforts to raise our boy girl twins without putting gender constraints on them, our son's favorite color is blue and our daughter will only wear pink or purple. It may just be them, but I have a suspicion that subconscious biases are swaying them towards these choices.
When the kids were around 2 years old, I said I want to start a children’s clothing line because I was so fed up every time I went to shop for clothing for our kids. But Kelly is the more rational person in our family and she said that starting a new business while still trying to grow Kirrin Finch while raising twin toddlers was maybe a step too far! You think?!
So we came to the realization that there was a way to combine the two ideas so that they could co-exist within our current business. We had always loved the designs and prints from kids clothes, because they tend to be fun and have lots of unique details and prints. I am not really sure why it is no longer appropriate to wear crazy clashing prints or dinosaurs all over your pants when you get to adulthood, but it shouldn’t be!
Prints have always been in the Kirrin Finch DNA, so we said it has to involve super bold and fun prints. And similar to how we founded our company, we chose the button-up shirt as our first kids product. It just seemed right that we also make the shirts in adult sizes so we had an excuse to go all out with the colors and patterns - hence the Mini-Me shirt collection was born.
We obviously needed models, and who better than the original inspiration, but our twins, Jasper and Piper. We had a planned vacation to Mexico after a 2 year hiatus from vacations due to covid, so we scheduled a local photographer to take photos of us as a family on the beach. The photos came out amazing, but let me tell you, there was a lot of crying involved and it is a miracle that we came away with any photos. There was a large supply of cookies on hand and promises of ice cream afterwards if they would just smile and look at the camera!
There are three shirts in the collection each in adult and kids sizes and they are aptly named The Piper, The Jasper and The Finn (Jasper and Piper’s middles name are Finley and Quinn, so Finn seemed like a good combination of the two). The kids shirts come in 12 months to 5T and the adult shirts come in sizes 0-24.
As part of our commitment to donate 1% of our sales to LGBTQ+ philanthropic organizations, we will be donating 1% of the sales from the mini-me collection to PFLAG, the first and largest organization for LGBTQ+ people, their parents and families, and allies.
We can’t wait to see all the cute family and friend matching photos.
