When Stacey Kalsi’s daughter was four months old, neither of them were sleeping.
The 35-year-old dentist from Maple Ridge remembers pacing the nursery in the dead of night. “I’d read about sudden infant death syndrome and I was terrified,” she says. “Every time she woke up crying or sweaty, I’d panic: Was she overheating? Was she safe?”
Like many first-time parents, Kalsi had entered a haze of sleeplessness and Google searches. One pattern stood out: her daughter would wake up with red heat rings around her neck, soaked in sweat no matter how light the blanket. In desperation, Kalsi dug into her own childhood memories. “My parents immigrated from India with very little, but they were adamant about one thing—natural fabrics,” she recalls. “We always wore cotton. They believed it helped us sleep and breathe better.”
That recollection sparked a hunch. Kalsi began researching breathable fabrics and discovered bamboo: hypoallergenic, moisture-wicking and thermal-regulating. She slipped the fabric on her baby one night. “My daughter slept through for the first time ever,” Kalsi says. And so, Kalsi’s bamboo sleepwear brand, Sunday Littles, was born.
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Before launching her business, Kalsi was—and still is—a full-time dentist. She grew up in Surrey, the first in her family to earn a university degree, inspired by her own experience with braces. “When my parents finally saved enough for orthodontics, it changed everything—my confidence, even how I performed at school,” she says. “I wanted to pay that forward.”
After earning a science degree from UBC, she pursued her mother’s dream of living in Los Angeles, completing a master’s in global medicine and a doctorate in dental surgery at the University of Southern California. When she returned home in 2019, she began practicing in Lillooet—a community of roughly 2,000 residents—many of them Indigenous. “A lot of patients had trauma or anxiety about seeing the dentist,” she says. “You had to slow down and build trust.”
Those lessons in patience and empathy now guide her business, too.
But they don’t make the juggling act any easier. Running Sunday Littles while working full-time as a dentist and raising two toddlers has tested every limit the mom- entrepreneur has. She works 12- to 13-hour clinic shifts and fits in business tasks during naps, preschool hours and early mornings.
“The guilt hits hardest when I have to say no to bedtime, or when I skip a business event because I can’t stand missing a night with them,” she says. “I’ve learned to set really strict boundaries. When I’m with my kids, I don’t touch my phone. When they sleep, that’s when I work.”
Despite the chaos, she can’t imagine giving up either career. “Dentistry was my mom’s dream for me—it’s what she sacrificed so much for,” she says. “But Sunday Littles gives me a sense of fulfilment I’ve never felt before.”
That pull between stability and creativity is what first pushed her to act on her late-night idea. What began as a fix for her daughter’s sleep slowly turned into sketches, research and testing—a second career quietly taking shape after clinic hours.
She spent a year visiting family-run manufacturers in China, testing over a hundred fabric samples before finalizing a durable, breathable bamboo blend she later trademarked.
But launching the brand brought new lessons. “At first, I thought I’d just make a website and people would buy,” she says. “I’d get so many abandoned carts. That’s when I realized I was spending too much on ads and not showing up enough myself on social media.”
When she began posting videos about her journey—balancing dentistry, motherhood and late-night packaging—sales started to follow. Within a year, Sunday Littles grew 568 percent, with roughly 70 percent of sales coming from Canada and the rest from the U.S.
But for Kalsi, those numbers are only one part of the story.
What she thinks about more often are the messages that arrive late at night from other parents—notes from mothers who finally got a full stretch of sleep, or whose toddlers are wearing pajamas that still fit a year later.
Kalsi still works full-time as a dentist and runs the brand largely from home, toggling between clinical precision and creative chaos. For her, success means holding both dreams—and finding time for bedtime stories.
