Today we’d like to introduce you to Brittany De Ridder.
Hi Brittany, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
We’re a small business run by two friends hoping to share our love of fashion and all things tiny. We met during college while working together in an upscale boutique for women – and became fast friends!
After 15 years of friendship and starting our families around the same time, our love of fashion soon turned into a love of children’s fashion. In our search for cute, personalized denim jackets for our kids, specifically in colors we loved, we found that most of the custom denim jackets on the market come with patches that are only available in a single color per letter.
So, depending on your child’s name, the letters can end up looking funky and clash. We decided to come up with two color palettes of 6 colors each – we call them “rainbow sherbet” (pinks, yellows, and oranges) and “ocean sunset” (blues, greens, and yellows.)
When we made up our first samples and put them on our kids. Friends and strangers alike would stop us in the street to ask where they could get their hands on a jacket, and thus, smallstar was born.
With such an amazing response to the jackets, we added sweatshirts to the line as well!
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Initially, things started out pretty smooth, though the reordering process was a challenge being that we were ordering more stock during covid, we ran into quite a few delays in receiving our jackets. But from this challenge, we brought in some adorable sweatshirts that were readily available, and customers loved them! The delays ended up being a blessing in disguise.
We also don’t have any help with the personalization process or technical end of things, so really everything falls on us to troubleshoot on our own. It’s definitely a learning experience!
As you know, we’re big fans of Smallstar Clothing. For our readers who might not be as familiar, what can you tell them about the brand?
I went to school at Long Beach State University and studied fashion design and merchandising, and my partner comes from a background in fashion as well – she was on the retail side and had her own wholesale business for many years. We both have a keen eye for style – so we know what we like and what we DON’T. All of these things helped us hone in on what we wanted to offer our customers. What was available on the market wasn’t quite exactly what we were looking for, so we decided to fill the gap. Our custom kids clothing line is small (jackets and sweatshirts only) but what we do offer are fun colors and the ability to choose exactly what colors you want. All of our letters come in every color we offer, so there’s no clashing or funky color combos here!
We’d love to hear about what you think about risk-taking.
Being that we both have young kids, our priorities are pretty in line with keeping our families first. Smallstar started out as sort of a fun project/side hustle while my business partner and I focused on raising our young babies. As they get older, we are able to dedicate more time to the business and help it grow. I would say we didn’t take too many risks and aren’t huge risk-takers in general. We got a good feeling based off of social media how the product would do first before we placed our big orders, so we felt good about taking the leap.
Pricing:
- Jackets range from $63-$98+
- Sweatshirts range from $33-$68+
- Hats w/ 1 Patch $20
Contact Info:
- Website: https://smallstarclothing.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smallstarclothing/
Image Credits
Alison Bernier
