Small Business Focus: The Green Kid

By Scott Etkin

If you live in the West 80s, it’s not uncommon to see Anastasia Vasilieva with her two young sons trotting behind her, each carrying packages and handing out fliers. They are making deliveries and promoting the website Anastasia founded, selling children’s clothing (ages 2 to 8) that is sustainably sourced, ethically made, and healthy.

Anastasia vets the brands herself, researching not only the materials, but how they are grown and how workers are treated. Other criteria include whether a business is minority-owned and what kind of packaging is used.

“We want to bring parents to one place where they can know that what they’re buying is supporting good in the world,” she says.

Anastasia started The Green Kid in 2021 after quitting her job as a management consultant at a major accounting firm. “I had never done anything risky before,” she smiles

Now, instead of giving compliance advice to corporations – work that demanded “all hours given to me on this Earth” – she’s running her own business out of a two-bedroom apartment. The site’s inventory competes for space with the boys, her husband, and a cat. “I do all the packing here as well as the boxing, wrapping, and thank-you notes,” she explains. “Essentially the business and the apartment are one.”

The Green Kid has gone from about 10 sales in its first month to 5-10 orders per day. Its first customers were parents at her son’s preschool. Today, they ship nationally, but the majority of customers are in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Anastasia often makes the deliveries in Manhattan herself, sometimes with her trusty helpers. These in-person interactions help her better understand her customers, “what they need and like.” About half of her orders are from repeat customers.

Anastasia grew up in the United Kingdom where there is “an awareness of the ethical and environmental problems of the fashion industry,” which is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions, and is a major source of pollution from wastewater. Millions of tons of textiles end up in landfills each year.

Many of the brands featured on The Green Kid are based outside the country or have global supply chains, which goes against the common dictum to ‘buy local.’ “You can’t have it all,” Anastasia says. “It’s all about balancing decision-making.”  

The Green Kid aims to have products in a “mid-priced” range. “We’re not offering a $300 t-shirt from Gucci, but neither are we offering a $15 t-shirt from H&M. It’s going to be priced at around $25 or $30,” she said. “But for that money you know you’re supporting a company that makes things ethically and does things correctly.”

Anastasia heralds a “less but better” philosophy when it comes to shopping. The reality is that most people “wear 20% of their wardrobe 80% of the time,” she says. Higher quality clothes tend to last longer, and all the products on The Green Kid are unisex, which makes it  easier to share them among siblings or pass them down to a friend or family member. 

The next phase for The Green Kid is the launch of its own in-house label, expected for Summer 2023. It will be a limited collection that will join the existing brands on the site. “It’s a very long process, because we need to make sure that the whole supply chain, from where the cotton is farmed to how it is shipped, is aligned with our principles.” 

Launching this product line, along with running the business, is, ironically, just as demanding as the job Anastasia left for lack of work-life balance. “I can honestly say, hand-on-heart, that I have never felt less regret about something. It’s a 24-hour job, but I love it.”