Meow Meow Tweet is 17 this year. Officially a teenager! One year away from buying a lotto ticket, two years away from renting a car, and old enough to know exactly who we are.
Teenagers get a bad rap, but they know things and early on—from our very first ever truckload, when we waited on a sidewalk with piles of boxes for the truck to arrive to schlepping 5-gallon buckets of olive oil up and down three flights of a Brooklyn walkup to our stubborn insistence on keeping our cat drawings when people told us we were too cute. We knew other things, too. We knew natural ingredients and low-waste packaging mattered before it was a selling point. We knew a business could be built on care, for skin, for people, for the planet, without performing any of it.
We didn't add queerness to our brand. We built the brand from it.
Being queer taught us something early: You don't wait for the mainstream to catch up. You build the thing you need for the people who need it. This Pride, we're not just celebrating the queer community. We're celebrating that original teen spirit. The joy that doesn't explain itself. The authenticity that outshines strategy. The wisdom that looks naive but turns out to be just right.
We've grown up a lot. But we're still that kid.
