When my son was born, we had already decided: no pink and blue. No "boy colours." His room was yellow and green. His early clothes were all over the place - orange, red, prints with leaves and animals and things that just looked nice.
We thought we were doing something different.
Then we started a baby clothing brand, and I realised how deep the thing actually goes.
Not in our home. In the world.
Every time we visited a store, walked past a display, received a gift, browsed a website - the division was there. Boy section. Girl section. Hard boundary between them. And within each section, a very narrow set of colours, prints and characters that were apparently appropriate for that half of the human population.
I kept thinking: my son is eleven months old. He has no opinion on this. He has never once expressed a preference for blue. He has also never expressed a preference for dinosaurs. He is eleven months old. He cannot even say the word dinosaur.
And yet the entire market had already decided - before he could speak, before he could point at something and say that one - exactly who he was and what he should wear.
I understand why it happens. Categories sell. Pink for girls, blue for boys means less thinking, faster decisions, easier gifting. It is a shortcut the industry has been using for decades and nobody really questions it because it has always been there.
But I kept coming back to the same question: what are we actually communicating?
Not just with the colours. With the whole system. With the way we walk a parent to the right section before they've said a word. With the way we put a child into a category before they've had a chance to develop a single actual preference.
We are making aesthetic decisions on behalf of a person who cannot speak yet. We are saying: we know who you are. Here is your uniform.
When we built Kiggle, the first thing we decided was that we would not have a boys section and a girls section.
It sounds like a small thing. It was not.
It changed every single creative decision we made. Because once you remove the shortcut - once you cannot just say this is for girls, make it pink - you actually have to think. You ask yourself: what makes this piece of clothing good? What makes it interesting? What makes a parent genuinely happy to put this on their child, and what makes a baby genuinely comfortable wearing it?
What we landed on was nature. Leaves. Florals. Animals. Stripes. Things that are beautiful because the world is beautiful, not because a marketing department assigned them a gender.
Parents noticed. Not just that the clothes were different - but that they felt different. A few of them told me they felt like they weren't being told who their child was before they'd had a chance to find out themselves.
That feedback stayed with me.
My son is a toddler now. He has strong opinions about everything. He has a favourite colour. He has specific thoughts about which bowl his food goes in and which direction he approaches the swing and whether his socks go on before or after his trousers.
None of those preferences were ones we gave him. They're his.
And that's what I keep coming back to. Children develop preferences. That's one of the most fascinating things about watching a small person grow up - they show you, slowly, who they are. Your job, as a parent, is mostly to make room for that. To not rush to conclusions. To resist the urge to fill in the blanks before they do.
The clothes industry has been filling in those blanks for a very long time. Before a baby has seen a colour, touched a fabric, pointed at anything, or expressed a single preference - the decision has already been made.
I think we can do better than that.
I think we can wait.
Shubham Kasera is the co-founder of Kiggle, an organic cotton kids and baby clothing brand from Kolkata. Founded in November 2024.