We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lamia Haley & Kristen O’Meally a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lamia, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

My business partner, Kristen O’Meally, is also my older sister. We started Kids for Culture in 2020. At the time, she was a preschool director and I was a soon-to-be-mom who was recently laid off due to the pandemic. We started Kids for Culture because we felt there was a need for good and hope in the world during a time of uncertainty. The pandemic brought about sudden adjustments by parents, educators and children alike. There was an increasingly tense atmosphere due to numerous racial injustices that were occurring across the country, and we decided we wanted Kids for Culture to focus on positivity through self-love and building cultural competence in young children. We pride ourselves in remaining true to our mission as we have continued to scale.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We are Kids for Culture, founded by two sisters, Kristen and Lamia, from Lexington, Kentucky. Kristen was a preschool director and purchased products for the school. Noticing the lack of diversity being reflected in products and the quality of products only lasting through a few interactions with young children, we decided to focus our products on what was needed. From there, we began to create quality children’s products, including flashcards, puzzles, books, games and plush toys, that promote diversity, self-love, and self-awareness.

We hope our business exposes children to diversity and self-awareness at a young age. Get them talking and learning about their own experiences and experiences outside of their immediate lives. With this we hope to teach children to love and understand themselves, as well as others, and decrease the racial divide that still stems across the nation today.

We don’t come from a family of entrepreneurs so we are proud that we started this business. Starting a business is not an easy task and it is always an accomplishment that any business owner should be extremely proud of. However our greatest accomplishment stems from the internal joy for not only starting a business, but building a foundation that has a true positive impact on not just the children, but also the adults that interact with children using our products.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

Kids for Culture was less than 6 months into business with only a few hundred social media followers. At the time, social media was our only marketing platform. We received an email through our Contact Us page on our website from a Walmart buyer looking to offer Kids for Culture’s products in their stores. The buyer found our Instagram through our hashtags, and now Kids for Culture’s products are available in all Walmart Supercenters across the US.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

At the start of the Kids for Culture journey, we sold our products exclusively on our website. We quickly realized in an effort to expand our reach we needed to explore other platforms. Towards the end of year 1, we expanded to wholesale to offer our products to retailers through Faire, and started selling on Walmart Marketplace. Very recently, at the end of year 2 we opened up shop to offer our products through Amazon. We are continuing to explore different platforms to raise brand awareness and offer customers the option to purchase Kids for Culture through multiple platforms.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kidsforculture.com
• Instagram: @kidsforculture
• Facebook: @kidsforculturellc
• Linkedin: Kids for Culture
• Other: TikTok: @kidsforculture