New York City start-up delivers kids' clothes every season
NEW YORK (FOX 5 NEWS) - A New York City mom has made it her business to help solve problems. Her latest venture is a personalized shopping site that delivers kids clothes right to your door. The brand is called Rockets of Awesome, and it's all about celebrating the awesomeness and individuality of kids while helping out parents.
CEO and Founder Rachel Blumenthal launched the company this summer, giving the clothing special design details like super soft linings and pops of color. Everything, even their silver leather bomber jacket, is washable.
So how does it work? Rockets of Awesome is an ecommerce site and personalized shopping service that captures customers' preferences. Rockets of Awesome sends a box of 12 items to their homes four times a year -- at the start of every season. Parents decide what they want and return what they don't. They only pay for what they keep. Shipping and returns are both free.
The clothes cost between $12 and $36 and are all Rockets of Awesome label, which means Blumenthal and her team come up with their own unique designs and control the quality.
She says she loves that Rockets can deliver both great style and quality, along with value. Parents share their kids' style preferences and the Rockets of Awesome team gets to work.
Blumenthal says the team will respond to anything parents or kids want. Some customers have said their boys want to wear skirts and, she says, and Rockets jumped over the moon to make that happen.
Rockets is Blumenthal's third business.
You could call her a problem solver in chief. At 24, when she couldn't find affordable jewelry that she liked, she created her own line, Rachel Leigh, which ended up on Oprah's Favorite Things.
When she became the first of her friends to have children, Blumenthal created Cricket's Circle, a community to help parents figure out what they really need to buy for their kids. That led her to raise $7 million and launch Rockets of Awesome this summer, offering clothes for boys and girls sizes 2 to 14.
Blumenthal says the service has a wait list of about 800 customers right now and is sold out of small sizes. She says very patient customers are waiting, and the company probably should've done the first inventory differently.
Even Blumenthal's 5-year-old son, Griffin, has had trouble getting a box. She says he runs around telling everyone Rockets is sold out.
While Blumenthal jokingly says she's an accidental entrepreneur, it just might run in the family. Her husband, Neil, co-founded the revolutionary eyewear startup Warby Parker, named the most innovative company in the world last year.
Now Rachel is trying to shake up the kids clothing sector and lend parents a hand. She says she really believes in making people's lives easier, and asks "Who doesn't want somebody who says 'Hey, let me make your life easier; let me do that for you and take that off your plate,' right?"
The next Rockets of Awesome boxes of winter clothes are shipping out in October. Rachel says Rockets has plenty of inventory in all sizes.
Once you order a box, your own personalized store is unlocked, where you can shop for individual items. So if your daughter falls in love with a pair of purple leggings, you can buy them in every other color or just stock up on the purple if she won't take them off.