Little Adventures

Little Adventures fixed its slow start by charging more. Two friends started sewing children's dress-ups in an Orem basement in 2001, and their first batch flopped at Orem City Days. A try on eBay flopped too. Then one morning Heather Granata told her partner, "We need to raise the prices," and the dress-ups started to sell.

The idea came out of a home daycare. Jennifer Harrison ran one, and she would watch Granata's three-year-old daughter whenever Granata had errands to run. "The kids at the daycare all lived in dress-ups," Granata told the Lehi Free Press in 2016. What the two mothers could find tended to be itchy, and much of it could not survive the wash, so they started sewing their own.

Their answer was a costume built like clothing. The company says every piece is machine washable, with seams wrapped in soft fabric and hems finished so a child can wear it all day. Each one pulls over the head or closes with hook and loop, since little fingers get frustrated with buttons. The company says it sends products to a third-party lab to test for lead and phthalates, among other things. It promises to replace any piece that does not hold up to play.

After a stretch of selling only on eBay, they sold that business and moved into wholesale. For five years shipping ran out of a house on North Center Street in Lehi, and Lehi residents signed on as employees. By 2016 the company had 16 employees in a Pleasant Grove office and wholesale customers in more than a dozen countries on five continents. It sold about 500,000 items the year before, the paper reported.

One of its better advertisements arrived by accident. Granata was reading an in-flight magazine on a plane when she saw Suri Cruise wearing one of their costumes, so she tracked down a copy and posted the photo on the company's site. By 2016 friends were sending in pictures whenever they spotted another celebrity child in a Little Adventures costume. Most brands pay for that kind of placement.

Giving has been part of the plan from the beginning. Each year the company picks a child who has faced cancer to help design a dress through its Little Heroes Designer Program, and proceeds from that dress help cover the family's medical bills. It has also sent hundreds of dresses and costumes to Candlelighters of New York for children in treatment there.

Washable has one limit. The care page says to machine wash cold and hang to dry, so the dryer sits this one out.

There is no storefront to visit. Everything sells online and ships from a warehouse in Pleasant Grove, and the company runs an outlet sale every spring and fall for anyone who still thinks the prices should be lower.