Inspired by the multi-mastering skills we exhibited, serving endless snacks to our toddlers, logging onto zoom school for the older kids all while running meetings and conference calls, Superkin launched our Add to Resume campaign, including a tee shirt with our favorite tagline: *Add to Resume: Grew a Human. As a maternity brand, the term “grew a human'' knocked it out of the park. But almost immediately, we heard from enthusiastic fans: “I’ve grown 3 humans!” “We’re adoptive parents!” and “What about dads!?”
The feedback hit us hard. The thought that we’d excluded anyone kept us up at night. All paths to parenthood are equally important, and while family structures vary, the universal thread is love. We’d always talked about dads as partners and cheerleaders, but for the first time we sold something he might want to wear, too. With $10 from each tee going to support Black Maternal Health outcomes with a donation to Black Mamas Matter Alliance, we realized that expanding the pie for everyone also meant we could do more good.
After the first round of tees sold out, our second production run included two new versions of our tee: *Add to Resume: Raising Humans and *Add to Resume: Raising A Human. Yes, it increased our fixed costs more but the outcomes were undeniable. The anxiety over constantly feeling that we’d excluded someone’s lived experience was replaced with joy. Joy that MORE people could participate in our campaign to support Black Mamas Matter Alliance. Joy that our sales grew. And joy in seeing our own spouses wear our tees.
The pandemic has been full of frustrating tradeoffs for parents, and this tee gives each of us a little bit of our mojo back. After all, raising humans is damn hard work. Our community selects the tee that best suits their own situation — and rocks it proudly.
We’ve all gained a new vocabulary over the last year: distance learning, rapid testing, PPE, community spread. The virus brought another term to the business community: the pandemic pivot. Superkin was originally launched as a maternity brand. Our mission: to banish the outdated notions of motherhood and reinvent them to be associated with her unwavering badassery and undeniable transformation.
Superkin the maternity brand thought about inclusion within the constraints of pregnancy: from the models and influencers we worked with to the messaging on our site, we prioritized racial, socioeconomic and body size diversity. But when our business expanded beyond maternity, largely fueled by the transformation we all experienced in the pandemic, we had to do more. The campaign, and expanding our focus from motherhood to parenting in general, was freeing. The bridge to true gender equity will be built by empathetic and passionate moms and dads.
