A couple of months later, when it became time to organize the baby shower, I decided I was going to lead the planning committee. Unfortunately, during the planning process my little sister and I realized, that there were no products available for same sex parents. Everything we found was very possessive, like “Daddy’s Little Princess” or “Mommy’s little angel”. There was nothing in the plural. In my family culture, homosexuality is very accepted and supported. So we were almost shocked that there was nothing out there to serve that market.

I officially launched Baby PeaTree in April of 2019, even though the idea for the concept already originated in 2010. My sister was still in college back then and was studying business management. She actually came up with the idea that we could do this, and I agreed. I came into this completely unaware and uneducated. Aside from being a heavy retail customer myself, I had absolutely no fashion experience. We started taking notes, doing market research and took on this journey step-by-step. It was actually a very slow process and it took us almost 8 years until we got the ball rolling and started actively working to build the brand. We launched on Earth Day in 2019 and all of our designs were geared towards the modern family; not only to same sex parents but other parents who had gone through IVF, surrogacy and adoption too – literally anybody who struggled with infertility.

Creating a brand that represented these children was a no brainer. I actually didn’t realize how uncommon it was, until we researched organizations that supported same sex parents and interacted with potential customers. You hear it and you read about it, but when you actually meet people firsthand or you have conversations with those who had been ostracized from their family, or no longer had relationships with a family member, because they chose to be themselves, was very shocking. I feel almost motherly about this. I don’t have kids, but with our community, they are now part of our family.

credit: Baby PeaTree

“We pulled this off with a lot of trial and error.”

Honestly, I thought, I had a pretty good business mindset. I’ve worked in the professional environment for about 15 years, and I had experience with event planning, coordination, project management and things like that before. I thought, how hard can it be? I also didn’t realize that when you’re working in fashion, you’re working with a lot of creatives. And creatives do not necessarily work on stringent timelines. They are producing when they’re feeling it.

The biggest hurdle for me was to sometimes just roll with the punches. Timelines that I created three months ago, may not be accurate anymore. How do I navigate around that and still meet my goals? In terms of marketing: My sister did have a business background, but she never worked in marketing. My biggest experience with social media was using Facebook and Instagram privately, but that was all for my personal pleasure. So we did some research on how to utilize Instagram for Business, how to handle hashtags and algorithms and all of that. I was up at night on regular basis watching YouTube videos and doing research online, to see what worked best. On top of that, we obviously worked with our big network of family and friends. Simple things like people sharing our page or connecting us with their network, helped us to open doors to a conversation with our customers.

The actual production in terms of working with designers, timelines, what it takes to order garments and to approve designs, was very much a learning curve. I felt like we went to college. But working a full-time career and building a brand from the ground up, made me realize how passionate I was about this.

We believe in climate control and we also have a lot of respect for Mother Earth. Therefore, sustainability is very, very important to us in terms of the brand and for inclusivity. We also needed to keep in mind, that baby skin is so sensitive and because of that, we wanted to make sure to remove any harmful products from our production. This is why we chose to only use organic cotton for our clothing lines.

The original garment manufacturers and the printers that we use are here in Southern California. We do mass produce all of our collections upfront and our warehouse holds the inventory here in Los Angeles. My sister´s job was from the beginning to run all the administrative side from New York. I on the other hand was doing a lot more of the logistics here in California. There´s a lot of navigating and we were really trying to offset workload on each other and be communicative of our needs. There were moments that we were both trying to do it all in the sense of staying true and honoring our commitments and responsibilities for timelines. But at the same time, I think we both had grace on each other and understood that we both still had day jobs. All we could do was communicate our needs and help as best as we could to show up for one another.