“We had a baby!”

Last time we spoke to Canberra YouTubers Chelsea and Natalia Brunton, their fanbase was babbling on the arrival of their first born.

“We had kept the sex a complete surprise, to both us and the world.” Baby Sage was born July 2021. Her arrival naturally slotted into the vlogs capturing the journey of Chelsea and Natalia’s modern family, now expanded by one.

“It’s hard trying not to make every vlog about her because we want to capture every single moment,” smiled Natalia when sitting down with CW once more.

“I don’t think our subscribers mind too much. It’s definitely a novelty to have a baby on the channel after so many years of it just being us.” The couple’s channel cracked 25K subscribers and over three million views since Sage’s birth.

“Sage was the only name that we knew for years and years that we wanted for our child, whether it was a boy or a girl,” said Natalia.

“We decided on it because it’s gender-neutral. If she grows up and decides to be somebody else, we wanted to make sure her name didn’t feel like something holding her back.”

Back when Natalia was shopping for baby clothes leading up to the birth, she struggled to find gender-neutral clothing that wasn’t brown or grey.

“It was so exclusively marketed to boys or girls. I got frustrated that I couldn’t find what I was looking for – baby clothes that had colour and were made for kids to play in without anything else attached. I thought, ‘That’s it. I’m going to do this myself.’”

Natalia’s new line of gender inclusive baby clothes and toys, PASTL, launched on 1 March. Though she’s kept her endeavours off YouTube, the response on other social media platforms has been “incredible”.

“I’ve heard time and time again that there’s been such a gap in baby products and ‘why hasn’t this been done before?’”

In a few words, she described PASTL as colourful, playful, and open. “Open to whoever, whatever, there’s no barriers on which child can wear it and what they can do.”

“At the moment, we’re sizes triple zero to four. While the focus for the initial drop is babies and toddlers, in the future, as Sage grows, I would like the brand to grow, too. This is just a hint of what’s already in the pipeline.”

She explained that PASTL’s business ethos, ‘colours are for everyone’, reflects what she knows to her core: “you are going to be your own person regardless of whether you get dressed in pink or blue”.

Thus far, PASTL is everything Canberrans love about a small sustainable business: compostable packaging, no excess plastic, and fair wage manufacturers.

Natalia decided to take it a step further and combine gender-neutral clothes with Montessori-inspired toys.

“Montessori basically means open-ended play. Things that kids can play with or use at any age.

“We have a vegan silk scarf that we’ve been using with Sage to play peekaboo. But as she gets older, it can become a cape, a roof to a cubby, anything really.

“The idea is not to restrict them in how they learn, how they play, how they can imagine … a lot of kids get stuck with clicking a button that starts flashing lights and they just kind of sit there, then press the button again.

“This idea is to keep kids moving, to opt for imagination rather than distraction.”

Particularly with her toy line, Natalia was inspired by motherhood and “how we’re bringing up Sage”.  

“To each their own, I can’t stress that enough, but I want her to be able to discover the world with her own hands, not through a screen.

“We’re bringing it back to the basics, letting kids be kids and colours be colours!”

Her advice to other new parents wanting to raise their child in a gender-neutral environment but faced with a lack of options, also comes down to the basics.

“At the end of the day, the biggest difference is made in how open-minded you are towards who they could potentially be.  What they wear is never going to be as important as your response to who they are.”

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