‘Birchbox For Children’s Clothes’ Wittlebee Wants To Automate Your Kid’s Wardrobe

Because I am going to be an awesome Mom, I will totally keep my ears open to the best possible options for my kids, because I’ve totally set my sights on that, focusing on family instead of career and all. Obviously.

Until hell freezes over then, I will be buying my more reproduction-friendly friends subscriptions to Wittlebee (rhymes with “little bee”),  a Science-backed “get random stuff sent to you”  startup run by my old friend and former Myspace marketing exec Sean Percival.

Wittlebee is like a Birchbox for kids clothes, where parents can get recurring/one-time shipments of children’s clothing for $39.99 a month — 8 items in total from brands like American Apparel and Cottonseed.

And yes, you can pick gender, age style and color preferences in the on-boarding process.

Percival tells me that the appeal of Wittlebee — in the same space as Thredup— is essentially the money saved by new parents, as the startup essentially packs about $80 of clothing in to each $40 box of clothing sent.

“Kids go through clothes fast and in today’s modern world it’s especially hard to keep up,” says Percival, “By auto shipping a few items each month, with sizes that grow along with your child, you can always stay one step ahead.”

A new father himself (that’s a picture of his daughter Charlotte below), he is sensitive to the needs of time-strapped parents, “The shopping experience with young kids can also be very challenging. With Wittlebee we save parents time, money and reduce those ‘mall meltdown’ moments.”

Knowing he wanted to do his own thing post Myspace, Percival tried out a few startup concepts before he settled on the Wittlebee model, operating the business out of an old server room at the Science offices until it grew enough to warrant a bigger office space.

Percival was sure he wanted to do a subscription e-commerce play — and his decision payed off — at about 100 subscribers Wittlebee moved out of the server room and the company is now at about 500 ($20K in revenue) in a month’s time.

“The business and much of what I do is inspired by [his wife] Laurie,” says Percival, “After getting a bit disenchanted by social media and online marketing I could only focus on solving problems for the most important people out there, moms.”

His future plans include testing out additional verticals and expanding to other age groups and kid-friendly items like books. “In most cases I’m trying to disrupt the existing and well established channels of retail so I’ve gotten a few funny looks along the way,” he says, “However clothing brands and some industry insiders have been genuinely excited about the model.”