How often do you meet a pre-teen with a business card?
There were actually a dozen kids, ages eight to 14, bearing business cards at Kidbox headquarters last Wednesday in Manhattan. They were the new Kids Board of Directors, all present and accounted for at the annual meeting, ready with ideas for the two-year-old Kidbox children’s wear business, and united in their passion for fashion and social good.
“Maybe we could brighten up the Kidboxes with more color,” suggested Sidney Keys 3rd, a 12-year-old entrepreneur from St. Louis, who is helping to end illiteracy having launched the Books n Bros book club and was voted chairperson of the Kids Board. “It makes me happy to see a whole bunch of color.”
Sylvie Reimer Sherman, a 12-year-old New Yorker and Kids Board member, wants to be a fashion designer and has the eye for it. “There could be more options in the assortment, on specific patterns,” she suggested. A swim shirt would also be a good idea. “It’s most important that you protect your shoulders and back from the sun,” she said.
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It’s clear that at Kidbox, kids are taken seriously. At the Kids Board meeting, there were sessions on the fashion business, leadership, technology, design and philanthropy, and the kids designed anti-bullying T-shirts. They’re all socially conscious in way or another.
Now Kidbox is developing private brands with input from kids and from data from Kidbox operations.
“The big differentiator here is rather than designing private brand based on fashion input of designers, we are designing based on input of data from customers,” said Haim Dabah, founder and chairman of Kidbox. “When we started the company, we realized that the data would drive development of product.”
“Our private brands are more about creating from the bottom up, tapping into what the kids want, so it doesn’t look like mini-me versions of what’s created for men and women,” said Miki Racine Berardelli, chief executive officer of Kidbox. “It’s really important to never speak down to our kids. They have no limit to ideas. We want to make sure their voices and expressions are all over this. We are not telling them what to wear.”
The three Kidbox private brands, launching for back-to-school in sizes 0 to 14 in girls and 0 to 16 in boys and with a total of 370 stockkeeping units, are:
• Miki B, for fashion-forward kids with “city cool” style. Think long-sleeve boatneck tops with bold prints and silver foils, two-pack leggings and joggers; gray knit dresses with stars; boys crewneck Ts with camo prints and updated joggers.
• Kid’s Club, for kids with modern casual and preppy preferences. Think dots and rugby stripes, girls long-sleeve knit keyhole tops in antique floral prints; long-sleeve ruffle tops in wispy floral prints and preppy stripes; dotted knit pants, and boys pocket Ts in rugby stripes, long-sleeve Henley and graphic Ts.
• Baby Basics for Kidbox, offering soft colors, soft fabrics, fun prints, three-pack onesies and zipper footsies.
“The exclusive [private] brands have a clear vision and handwriting which speaks to our customer profiles — city cool, preppy and modern casual,” said Sinead Fitzpatrick, vice president of design and production, who leads the Kidbox private brand program.
Kidbox, selling children’s and baby clothes, operates like a subscription business but without subscription fees. Six seasonal boxes for spring, summer, back-to-school, fall, holiday and winter, are automatically shipped to families annually, as well as some limited-edition themed boxes between seasons. The boxes are sent to families via “push commerce” involving a machine-learning algorithm making data-driven decisions that help Kidbox stylists select items and customize assortments. Each box has six or seven items from 130 brands that the company buys from. For a complete box of all seven items, the price is $98, and with that, an article of new clothing is donated to a child in need through a partnership with Delivering Good. The two-year-old company estimates having donated $8.5 million in new clothing by the end of the summer.
For b-t-s, at least one or two of the seven items will be selected from a Kidbox private brand, so private brand will represent about 20 percent of the business. “Clearly exclusive brands/ private label generate higher margins,” Dabah said. “The styles and products we make are in response to Kidbox customers needs as our data indicates.”
From the Kidbox private brand collection.
Meanwhile, there’s more to the Kids Board than just the annual meeting. They communicate through the year remotely by conferencing calls. The other members are:
• Naomi Wadler, 11, a March for Our Lives activist from Alexandria, Va.
• Jayden Perez, 9, from Woodland Park, N.J., who organized a drive and hand-delivered 1,100 toys to child hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.
• Daniella Marie Benitez, 13, from San Diego. She builds homes for families in need.
• Addisyn Maree Goss, 12, from Linden, Mich., who founded Snuggle Sacks, a survival kit for the homeless.
• Grace Anne Richardson, 14, from Minneapolis, who donates school supplies in partnership with the Kids in Need Foundation.
• Josiah Smothers, 9, from Ashburn, Va., who raises awareness for pediatric cancer.
• Ella R. Tryon, 8, from Cleveland. She’s donated more than 29,000 boxes of crayons at children’s hospitals with the Help Me Color a Rainbow foundation.
• Carter Bucholz, 10, from Wooster, Ohio, who raises hundreds of dollars for Greenpeace to fight global warming.
• Aden Joseph Garf, 12, from Needham, Mass., a creative thinker ready to positively impact the world with Kidbox.
• Bella Temple, 13, from Lexington, N.C., a designer, mentor to younger children in her school and participant in give-back programs.
• Brooklynn Prince, 7, is a Kidbox “ambassador” and actress in The Florida Project, join the Kids Board for the annual meeting.