What do you do with extra products? Let’s say, in this case, headbands. You could do the obvious, sure. Send them to bloggers, donate them to a clothing drive, keep them all for yourself and dress up as the giant tangled headband creature from the back of your sock drawer for Halloween… all good ideas. But we wanted to do something that was, well… more.
On May 25, 2016, we paid a visit to the Children’s Hospital of Orange County to donate 200 headbands in a rainbow of colors. Half of the office piled into a car (yes, we’re a small company) and off we went, armed with boxes of headbands and a mass of yarn, rhinestones, fabric glue, ribbons, and football buttons. It was a colorful, joyful mess of stuff, and one that we admittedly had a lot of fun picking out at the craft store (shout out to Hobby Lobby).
Our contact, Amber Chavez, the Special Programs Coordinator at CHOC, helped us organize the entire morning. We arrived and set up shop in two playrooms in different wings of the hospital, and for the entire morning, we got to create wearable (and some not so wearable) masterpieces with all kinds of wonderful kids from all walks of life. From rhinestone-ornamented creations to headband-turned-pillows and even a pom pom glue-covered snowman, the things that these kids dreamt up were imaginative and pretty darn cool, if not covered in copious amounts of fabric glue (or as one girl called it, “snow”).
It is estimated that over 10,000 children in the US under the age of 15 will be diagnosed with cancer in 2016. Organizations like CHOC help to give these kids treatment, care, and the opportunity to still act like a kid, thanks to events big and small, like headband crafting. Thank you for such a humbling and enjoyable experience, CHOC, and we hope to be back again very soon.
For more information about CHOC (opens in new window), click here.
