From Childrenchic to Marjen: Why We Changed Our Name

Twelve years ago, we went looking for a shoe. The one our mother used to bring us home in her suitcase, back from Spain. The Mary Jane we wore for every birthday and family Sunday, growing up in New York City. We wanted that same shoe for our own daughters.

We were still in New York, this time raising girls instead of being girls ourselves. We could not find it. The beauty was still out there. So was the craftsmanship. What did not exist was a shoe that let a child feel like a kid, free to run and climb and play, and still look good after. So we made it ourselves.

We called it Childrenchic. We built it in a family run workshop in Alicante, Spain, the same workshop we still work with today. One hand cut pattern at a time. Over the next twelve years, Childrenchic became something bigger than where it started.

Why change a name that was working.

We sat with this question for a long time. Childrenchic gave us our first customers, our workshop, our craft. We were never looking to walk away from any of that. This is not a reinvention. It is the next page of a story we started on day one.

But the company outgrew the name we gave it when it was so much smaller. We added loafers, then boots, then sandals, made in a second workshop we came to trust in Felgueiras, Portugal. Families further from home than we expected started finding us. Childrenchic had done its job, but it was built for a smaller room than the one we were standing in now.

So we asked ourselves a simpler question. Not what we sell, but what we want to be known for. Not one product, but a shoe a family keeps coming back for.

Childrenchic was the beginning. Marjen is the brand we always knew we were building.

What is not changing.

Here is what matters most. Every Mary Jane we make still comes out of the same workshop in Alicante, Spain. Every loafer, boot, and sandal we have added since is made the same way, by hand, in our workshop in Felgueiras, Portugal. Both are places where the craft has been handed down through generations.

Every pattern is still cut by hand. Every shoe is still inspected and finished by a person, not a machine. The soles are still built specifically for children: flexible enough to bend with a growing foot, grippy enough for a wet sidewalk, sturdy enough for real everyday wear.

And the Mary Jane is still the heart of everything we make. It has outlasted every trend because it was never really about trend. It is tied to childhood, to memory, to the way certain shoes mark certain days of a life. As we grow into new categories, that shoe stays the standard we hold everything else against.

What we believe.

We have always believed that quality is felt in the details. The way a shoe fits. The way it lasts. The people who make it. That has never changed.

It is also why how we build has always mattered as much as what we build. Our workshops run on solar power. Every insole uses recycled cotton and polyester. Every outsole uses a recycled rubber blend. A growing number of our designs use a process that requires no water and no chemicals at all. We are raising the children these shoes are made for, and we take that seriously.

What comes next.

The Mary Jane brought us here. What comes next is bigger: new categories, new places, new children growing up in shoes we made. We intend to keep working the same way we always have, alongside the same two workshops in Spain and Portugal that have carried this company from the beginning.

We are building Marjen to become the kind of children's footwear company a family returns to for years, and eventually, we hope, for generations.

You can find us now at shopmarjen.com, still making the same shoe we went looking for twelve years ago. Just with a name that finally fits the whole story.

Made to be remembered. We mean that literally.

Until next time,

Cori and Isa

Marjen (formerly Childrenchic) is a children's footwear brand co-founded in 2014 by Cori Galdo and Isabel Mendoza. Every pair is handcrafted in Spain and Portugal and carried by Bergdorf Goodman, Nordstrom, and Zappos. Explore the full Mary Jane Collection.