The British brand taking children's style more seriously

Spark & Flare has built a brand around a peculiarly neglected customer: children aged seven to 13 who have discovered personal style before the fashion industry has quite decided what to sell them.

At some point, usually rather earlier than their parents expect, children begin objecting to their clothes.

The jumper is embarrassing. The trainers are wrong. The perfectly serviceable coat bought six months ago has acquired some mysterious social defect. Clothes, once largely a question of warmth, durability and whether they survive the washing machine, have become a matter of identity.

For parents, this can be expensive and occasionally bewildering. For the fashion industry, it presents an interesting problem.

Children aged seven to 13 occupy an odd piece of commercial territory. They are increasingly conscious of brands, trends and what their friends are wearing, but they have not yet reached the teenage market. Traditional childrenswear can suddenly look juvenile. Adult fashion, meanwhile, is precisely that: designed for adults.

Spark & Flare is a young British designed label attempting to make a business out of the years in between.

Its proposition is refreshingly specific. Rather than making children's versions of adult products, it concentrates on accessories intended for this particular age group. The range currently revolves around caps and sunglasses, with much of it priced below £20.

The products borrow liberally from streetwear. There are baseball caps, trucker caps and flat brim styles, with embroidered logos, branded hardware and the sort of packaging and detailing more commonly used to persuade adults that an ordinary object is considerably more desirable than its practical function would suggest.

That is not necessarily a criticism. Children understand these signals too.

Indeed, that is rather the point.

The age of opinion

The interesting thing about Spark & Flare is less the baseball cap than the assumption behind it: that children in these middle years constitute a fashion customer in their own right.

The company involves children in product development through what it calls its Junior Style Champions, using their responses to test and refine designs.

There is something sensible in this. Childrenswear has traditionally been bought by adults and therefore, to a considerable extent, designed to satisfy them. But the balance of power changes as children grow older. The parent may still possess the credit card, but increasingly the child possesses the veto.

The internet has accelerated this change. Children encounter clothes, trainers, celebrities and trends long before they become conventional fashion consumers. They have access to an adult sized visual culture while remaining physically, financially and emotionally very much children.

Brands face an awkward choice in responding to that. They can make childhood look increasingly like adulthood, or accept that this is a distinct stage deserving a visual identity of its own.

Spark & Flare is attempting the latter.

Its sunglasses, for example, are not merely adult frames presented on younger models. Styles are produced around junior proportions, with particular designs intended for different ages within the seven to 13 bracket. The company says they use polarised lenses with UV400 protection.

It is a small detail, but an important one. There is a difference between designing something for a child and simply making the adult version smaller.

A cap can mean more than a cap

The brand becomes more interesting again with its Hero Collection.

The caps carry words including Brave, Fierce, Fearless, Formidable and Move Mountains. For every Hero Collection cap purchased, Spark & Flare says another is donated to children supported by Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity, with children undergoing chemotherapy particularly in mind.

The language of confidence runs throughout the business. It could easily descend into the familiar vocabulary of corporate empowerment, were it not attached to an age at which confidence can be an unusually fragile commodity.

Anyone who remembers being 11 knows that clothes can matter enormously precisely when adults think they should not.

The right trainers do not transform a childhood. Nor does the wrong baseball cap ruin one. But appearance becomes entangled with belonging remarkably early, and the first experiments with personal style tend to arrive at roughly the same time as the first serious anxieties about fitting in.

Fashion likes to pretend that self expression is an adult preoccupation. The school gate suggests otherwise.

Can a small idea become a large brand?

Spark & Flare is still young enough that its ambitions are considerably larger than its present collection.

For the moment this is principally an accessories business. There is no sprawling wardrobe or attempt to furnish every part of a child's life. That restraint may be useful.

A UK trademark application associated with the Spark & Flare name extends across a much wider range of goods, including clothing, footwear, bags, jewellery and watches, suggesting the idea could eventually become a broader junior lifestyle label.

That would be the more difficult test.

Caps and sunglasses are relatively forgiving places to begin. They do not require the labyrinth of sizing involved in building a substantial clothing range, and parents can indulge a child's changing tastes without committing to a particularly expensive purchase.

Moving from an accessory somebody likes to a label somebody identifies with is another matter entirely.

Yet Spark & Flare has identified something larger brands can sometimes overlook. Children do not wake up on their thirteenth birthday and suddenly develop taste. Nor do they move neatly from dinosaurs and cartoon characters to the adult fashion floor.

There is a messy period in between when they know exactly what they do not want, even if they cannot quite articulate what they do.

It is a difficult customer to design for. It might also be a rather valuable one.

For all fashion's obsession with discovering the next demographic, the curious thing is that this particular group has been standing in front of the wardrobe all along, refusing to wear what its parents have laid out.