This mother couldn't find dinosaur t-shirts for girls - so she started her own company

When author Cheryl Rickman took her seven-year-old daughter Brooke clothes shopping, she knew Brooke was only after one thing: dinosaurs.

But after looking for ages, they realised that the only t-shirts in the girls' aisle were all princesses and pink.

Frustrated with the fact that the things Brooke loved like dinosaurs, football and pirates were never aimed at girls, the mother and daughter had an idea: why not start their own t-shirt company?

Climbing Trees Kids launched last month, tackles gender stereotyping with designs like flower-bearing dinosaurs splashing in puddles and female robots, pirates and monsters.

Cheryl says the range “isn’t so much gender-neutral as gender-empowering.”

We don't want to get rid of flowers or pink. We just want to flip the gender stereotypes on their head to provide girls (and boys) with a choice not previously offered to them.

We wanted to reclaim motifs that have been reserved for boys and give girls the chance to wear them too, without always having to buy them from the boys’ department... Nobody should tell children what they can and can't like. It's how they express themselves.

Because as the company's name suggests, both she and Brooke like climbing trees, Cheryl said a percentage from each £11 t-shirt sale is being donated to The Woodland Trust.

Check out the Climbing Trees website here.

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