How My 3.5-Year-Old Inspired Me to Start an Apparel Brand

It started during a morning my 3.5 year old daughter asked me a question that sent me scouring through the internet for nearly an hour.

“Why is there no smell for water?”

As I searched on Google, it turned out adults around the world have been pondering this question too. “Does water have a smell” on Quora, “Does water have smell?” on Stackexchange, “Why does water have no taste or smell?” on Reddit.

While I could just have answered, “Water doesn’t have smell. That’s just how water is”, she is usually far from happy with such superficial answers. She would quickly retaliate with a “But Why?”

My daughter needs answers backed up with adequate data and logic. The longer and more descriptive an answer, the higher the probability she’d be satisfied with the answer. If she’s not, she continues to persist with an avalanche of “Why?” “What if..” “What happens if…” questions.

“There is precipitation in my eyes.”

“Why is the wheel a circle?”

“Can I taste some Sodium Chloride?”

“Yogurt is a semi-solid food.”

“I want to drink the apple juice and make my skeleton cool”

“What happens if Earth doesn’t have gravity and moon gets gravity?”

While she loves to read fact-oriented books, a lot of her learning emanates from just observing, asking probing questions, and interconnecting seemingly unrelated ideas.

When I once asked her “What happened, how did you fall down?” just after she fell playing in the playground, she replied “Because I lost my center of gravity. My tarsal hurts.”

Add an ounce (actually, a gallon) of intense imagination to an insatiable curiosity. She drew something on her drawing notebook and said “It’s a polar bear with an ear muff in the Ice-Age.”

I said, “Interesting. But why is the polar bear wearing an ear muff?”

“I said it’s the Ice-Age” she replied, visibly unhappy on why I would ask such an obvious question.

It was personally inspiring to notice her penchant for curious questions and an imaginative interpretation of her drawings. She continues to be a new learning project for us every single day – with a dire need for constant intellectual stimulation to feed her imagination, something new, interesting and challenging to fuel her over-excitable thought process.

In one of my persistent duels with myself in finding the best ways to keep her occupied and satisfy her thinking, was born my earliest ideas for Oviyam – How could I bring in simple learning of complex facts and also make it an innately fun experience?

T-shirts are one of the first things I set out with. But why t-shirts?

Well, everyone from kids to adults wear them, anything written on them is very visible, you wear them everywhere so more people tend to see and read them, and it adds an element of character to your personality. Now, if the t-shirt actually conveyed an interesting science fact – it would then vindicate my original goal – bring in simple learning of complex facts and make it an innately fun experience.

Oviyam means art. Oviyam T-Shirts are a blend of hand-created digital artwork and a subtle message that’s educational and fun for kids as well as adults.

Did you know what our DNA is made of? The “Oviyam DNA Double Helix Hydrogen Bond Science T-Shirt” would give you the answer.



Vidhya Narayanan is a mom, an entrepreneur, photographer, nature lover and a bird-watcher.