The moment arrived quietly, the way most pivotal ones do, in a San Francisco bedroom where a four-year-old boy reached for sparkle and his twin sister reached for black. Elizabeth Brunner watched her son and daughter swap glitter and camo across each other’s dressers, and where another parent might have seen a laundry problem, the entrepreneur saw a thesis. That everyday scene became StereoType Kids, the childrenswear label she now describes as built on “blended fashion,” an intentional mix of traditionally masculine and feminine elements designed to let children, in her words, “dress for joy, not gender.” Launched in the disorienting middle of the pandemic and bootstrapped entirely from savings by an entrepreneur who had no intention of starting another company, the brand has grown into a six-figure business anchored not only by clothing but by a children’s book and a song that has traveled as far as South Africa.
Brunner did not arrive at this idea cold. She spent a decade in sustainable fashion first, earning her degree from the California College of the Arts, interning at the storied design firm Pentagram, and cutting her teeth in London before launching her first label, Piece x Piece, in 2010, a line stitched from discarded sample fabrics. When she closed that business in 2018 to write children’s books, her twins handed her the next chapter without meaning to. “I have a boy and a girl, and around age four, they started sharing each other’s wardrobe,” she says. “I saw how much wonder and joy it brought them.” Her daughter’s love of black and her son’s love of sparkle became the earliest design cues for a category she would go on to trademark as Blended Fashion.
The launch itself was, by her own admission, a beautiful act of bad timing. She went live in 2020 with only samples in stock, waiting eight to nine months for finished product to arrive, a reversed sequence she now calls the product of “such a strange time.” Initial costs, including inventory and a photo shoot, ran roughly $20,000, pieced together through local factories she knew from her first label. “I launched during the pandemic,” she says. “I’m not sure that was the wisest choice, but I was energized by it.”
What has followed is a study in restraint. Brunner calls herself a “heart-centered founder” and insists the money was never the point. “I didn’t come into the idea of the business to say, wow, I’m gonna make a ton of money off this idea,” she says. Yet the numbers followed anyway, arriving through word of mouth, press, and podcast appearances rather than paid advertising or the algorithm. Her Instagram following remains modest, a few thousand strong, and she resists the pressure to chase virality with something close to defiance. She spends instead on the garments themselves, using fair-trade factories and sustainable fabrics to justify prices that run from $30 to $130. The breakout piece is a $129 sweatshirt blazer she calls a “modern hoodie,” a garment cut like tailoring but made from the soft stuff of loungewear. Parents keep asking for an adult version. The truer endorsement comes from one child who loves it so much they sleep in it.
To grow past apparel, Brunner layered in storytelling. In June 2025 she published a children’s book, Me Is All I Want to Be, about a snake who longs to wear a T-shirt but believes he cannot, having no arms. “It’s really a book about self-discovery and thinking outside of the box and getting uncomfortable, but standing true to yourself and being authentic,” she explains. Independent bookstores, particularly across the Midwest, have placed sizable orders. A companion song of the same name, co-written with a children’s songwriter and featuring her twins on backup vocals, has become an unlikely brand ambassador. “It’s reached all the way to South Africa,” she says. “It’s so meaningful that the song is reaching different parts of the world and having such a profound effect.”
Her stance has, predictably, drawn critics, and her defense is disarmingly simple: she does not read the comments. “For me, it’s really about looking at my own children and the kind of world that I want them to grow up in and the kind of world I want them to be free in,” she says. She has a phrase for her strategy, “slow is fast,” a deliberate refusal to race. “I’m trying to create an ecosystem that is thoughtful, meaningful, authentic and safe. That just takes time.” An introvert who once imagined running the brand like the Wizard of Oz behind a curtain, she has learned to step out front. Her advice to other founders carries the weight of someone who has lived it: get comfortable being uncomfortable.
