When you’re in a store looking at the clothing available for kids, what do you see? You’ll probably notice some differences between what’s available for boys and what’s available for girls. Prints and colors you see for one might not be available for the other. Despite some progress, clothing is still often sold along gendered lines to the disappointment of the girl who wants trucks on her shirt and the boy who wants a unicorn on his.

Luckily, those who have noticed this disparity are helping change it. After seeing that girls wanted more than what was available, Rebecca Melsky and Eva St. Clair started Princess Awesome and now sell a range of items for girls with designs like dinosaurs, circuits, and airplanes.

So, what about boys? Enter Boy Wonder. The founders of Princess Awesome recently launched the new company with the goal of offering to boys what they can’t find in stores right now. To find out more, I interviewed Melsky over email about the brand and how they hope to make a difference.

With Princess Awesome, you wanted to fill the gaps in what was available for girls and combat stereotypes with your designs. How does Boy Wonder do the same for boys?

There are serious limitations on the boys’ side of the clothing aisle. There are many themes, colors, and embellishments that you only find on girls’ clothes in most mainstream stores. The boys’ side is full of navy blue, red, brown, gray, trucks, dinosaurs, trains, dogs, and sports, but you won’t find pink, purple, bright colors of any kind, unicorns, hearts, rainbows, ice cream, cats or sparkles, sequins, or bows. We know many boys who love all of these things, and we think all kids suffer when topics or colors are designated for one gender only. We wanted to create clothes that fill this gap and meet the need of so many boys and their families out there.

Why was now the right time for you to launch this brand? What made you decide to expand beyond Princess Awesome?

Customers and supporters have been asking us since the earliest days of Princess Awesome to “do the same thing for boys’ clothes.” There were essentially two things that needed to happen to allow us to expand to a second brand. First, at the beginning, we wanted to fully expand and explore the product offerings of Princess Awesome and stay laser-focused on our mission to give girls more clothing options. We didn’t want to divert any attention away from that.

Secondly, it took us a while to think about what Boy Wonder products would be. Product development for Boy Wonder isn’t exactly as simple as “just do what we do for Princess Awesome but for boys.” How would we create clothes that look like they’re intended for boys but also showcase all of these traditionally more feminine subjects and colors?

After a few years of running Princess Awesome, we felt like even though we are still a very small company—the only two full-time employees are still just us (Rebecca and Eva, co-founders)—we had the creative and organizational bandwidth to keep Princess Awesome running smoothly and branch out into a new brand with its own unique products.

What are some of the issues with the clothing that's available (and missing) for boys?

As I mentioned earlier, the current offerings for boys in most mainstream stores are very limited in color, theme, and style. There are very few bright colors (especially in the winter), and a long list of topics that don’t appear at all. There are also very few all-over repeating prints—which has become part of Princess Awesome’s brand appeal. When boys do get repeating prints they tend to be very boring repeats of one or two elements in just a couple colors. In addition to bringing unicorns, cats, and bright colors to the boys’ section, we also wanted to bring interesting, fun repeating prints.

Tell me a little bit about your current offerings. How and why did you decide to start with these designs?

Before we developed the initial Boy Wonder products, we conducted a survey that generated over 5,000 responses from parents of boys who were interested in the concept of the new brand. The parents we heard from had such a wide range of desires for their kids. Some wanted pink and unicorns and sparkles. Some were happy with the current topics on boys’ clothes, but wanted more colors and rainbows. Some just wanted more fun STEM clothes.

We knew that we wanted to create a range of products that had something for all of these groups. We knew that we had to have unicorns and cats right off the bat as those are two of the most glaring omissions from mainstream boys’ departments.

Then we played with different styles of shirts, different repeating prints, different graphic designs. We ran small focus groups. We asked our friends and husbands and kids. And we came up with our Debut Collection. We can’t wait to add more to it.

Princess Awesome also offers accessories and items for adults. Are those areas you'd like to expand into at Boy Wonder as well?

Possibly! We have to identify a market demand for them, build up our capacity to make them, and then we’ll give it a shot.

Why is it important for there to be more options available for boys? What impact can more types of clothing have?

Clothing speaks. The clothing options available speak TO kids. Kids see what’s in stores and what their friends are wearing, and they begin to learn at a very early age what is “for” each gender. If they happen to like something that isn’t offered to them, that they don’t see anywhere, it tells them that their interest isn’t valid because they identify as that gender. And clothing speaks FOR kids to the adults around them. It tells those adults what they like, informing adults about what they might want to talk about. Boys deserve to be seen for their full range of interests apart from gender stereotypes, just like girls.

Also, in many ways, Boy Wonder is a harder sell for a lot of people than Princess Awesome is. As a society, we value traditionally “male” things more than “female” things, and we have a harder time accepting a boys’ interest in unicorns than we do a girls’ interest in dinosaurs. By offering boys themes, colors, and styles that are seen as more feminine, we are also saying that these things are just as valuable as the things men have traditionally been associated with. And we think that’s good for all kids (and adults!).

Do you have more designs already planned? What should readers keep an eye out for in the future?

We are already hard at work on next year’s line up for both Boy Wonder and Princess Awesome. We’ll have more matching sets for both brands and adults (look out Pi Day!), the Cool Cats print that won the Spoonflower Design Challenge that we ran earlier this year, and we’re hoping to bring out some dolphin and butterfly products too, as those are two animals that only ever appear in the girls’ section.

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Boy Wonder is defying stereotypes about clothing for boys