Introducing Gangly Sister

Who is Gangly Sister, and why did they declare 2014 the Year of the Girl? The company put out a video called 2014: The Year of the Girl, where they interview girls about their new year's wishes.

"It's just obvious to us. Everyone is so fed up with the media's bombardment of girls with pink unicorns and high-heels for toddlers," says Miriam Lottner, co-founder of Gangly Sister. "It was just a matter of time before we ladies took things into our own hands."

Taking things into their own hands is precisely what Gangly Sister is doing. The founders are parents, and they realized that they could simply produce their own content rather than wait for Hollywood to come around.

"It’s just like any startup," said Lottner. "We saw a problem and set out to solve it."

Gangly Sister will be coming out with the pilot for their animated series, Purple and Nine, later in January.

The Gangly Sister team is setting out to provide clean and funny entertainment for girls, and at the same time expose them to different types of technology. Co-founder Rebecca Rachmany says that there is nothing scary about technology, and that it's not just about coding.

"My favorite example of technology is the coating on chocolate-covered ice cream pops. When I was a kid, that coating used to crack into pieces, but thanks to technological developments, now you can enjoy that chocolate on the more expensive ice cream pops," explains Rachmany.

While that seems like a trivial example, it illustrates how conservative we are in our ideas of "technology." In fact, technology has made it possible to grow food in arid climates, treat diseases, recycle plastic, and even run faster. When you think about it, technology influences everything.

Gangly Sister emerged from the founders' frustration at having so few women in startups. While programs abound to encourage women at later stages in their live to learn to code or to get into technology companies, that's a fairly late stage in life.

The idea behind Gangly Sister is to catch kids at ages 8-12, when they are imagining what they would like to be when they grow up. In the Purple and Nine series, there are no bad guys or mean girls. It's all about two kids who just want to help out their friends, get along with their families, and have a great time. They just happen to use technological inventions to fix those problems.

To learn more, check out http://www.ganglysister.com.