California Mom Takes 'Free to Wear Pink' Campaign to Social Media
Martine Zoer wants kids to be free to express themselves.
— -- A stay-at-home mom who started a kids’ clothing line when she saw her own son conforming to society’s ideas of what boys should wear has launched a movement to let all kids be “free to wear pink.”
“I want to change society to be more accepting,” the mom, Martine Zoer, told ABC News. “Once kids get to school-age, something kind of changes, they get exposed to what society says we should be doing.”
Zoer, who lives with her husband and two sons, Tyler, 6, and Tristan, 3, in Sunnyvale, California, founded the Quirkie Kids clothing line in April after raising around $2,500 through a Kickstarter campaign.
The clothing line, available online only, features pink and purple T-shirts and onesies with animal images and more designed for both boys and girls.
“A lot of boys like pink but once they get to a certain age they don’t want to wear it anymore and that’s what inspired me,” Zoer said. “Then I got a lot of emails from parents who said, ‘My daughter likes space and dinosaurs,’ and all they could find were traditional girly clothes.”
The positive feedback Zoer received from the $20 and under clothing line inspired her to take her mission even further with the #freetowearpink social media campaign.
“It’s not just about boys wearing pink or girls wearing a dinosaur shirt but kids just expressing themselves through their clothing and expressing their uniqueness,” she said. “That goes for parents, too, because sometimes my kids will pick something out and I don’t really like it but it’s like, OK, you can go out wearing a Spider-Man costume or one rain boot and one shoe.”
Zoer is encouraging parents to post photos of their kids’ outfits to social media outlets with the #freetowearpink hashtag, just as she has been doing with her own sons.
“I just posted a photo of my son wearing his ‘Army’ pants today because he wanted to be invisible to the other kids at the playground,” Zoer said of a photo of son Tyler in camouflage pants she posted on Quirkie Kids' Facebook page. “That’s just him using his imagination.”
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