Behind the Scenes: Shooting My Children’s Collection
Dear Reader,
I write to you from our cottage in Santa Barbara, CA. We head to the airport in one hour. My kids are napping, so it’s silent. I’m looking over the gardens of San Ysidro Ranch, taking in an ocean view.
We stayed here for a week to capture my children’s collection — and I cannot help but feel the full weight of it all. Being here to shoot a collection I poured my heart into… in a place where my heart already belongs.
There’s something about being married with two kids that makes every creative project feel different. Deeper. More rooted. Less about ambition and more about meaning. Less about “launching something” and more about making something for the people who made you who you are.
Designing a children’s line while raising small children is this strange, tender loop. You’re creating pieces for the stage of life you’re currently in — the stage that feels both endless and fleeting.
I spent the week watching my daughters run through these gardens wearing pieces I sketched a year ago, and it hit me: this is what I’ll remember. Not the deadlines or the fittings or the logistics… but this.
The moments where your work and your life accidentally braid together into something that feels like truth. Like the way a dress moves when a child is actually living in it.
Elevated pieces that aren’t too precious. They can move, play, enjoy.
This collection began with tiny seeds of memory — a dress I wore in 1990 that now looks exactly like Quinn, a pair of doll pants my grandmother sewed that inspired the Daphne pant set, a floral I wanted to feel nostalgic but not overly sweet, linens that could survive real childhood. It feels precious, but non-pretentious. Elevated, but approachable. Livable. Everything intentional.
I kept asking myself one question, over and over, throughout this process:
What do I want my children to remember?
Not trends. Not noise. But softness. Ease. Play. Pieces that feel like family — like something you’d find in an old album and immediately recognize.
It’s emotional, designing in this season. You’re not just making clothes; you’re capturing a stage of life that’s moving faster than you can hold it.
And somehow, shooting it all here — in a place we’ve come back to year after year — made everything feel full-circle.
I can’t wait to share more with you. For now, I’m soaking in this last bit of quiet before the airport and the chaos and the next chapter.
But I wanted to send this little note, from this little cottage, before the moment slips away.
More soon.
With love,
Megan
All photos taken either by me or my friend Sara Prince.