Some time ago Chris came up with this t-shirt that had a simple sentence on it, “Enjoy this beautiful day.” We printed it on a whim, and found that we all really liked it. We saw a place for t-shirts like these to communicate simple messages, kinda like a bumper sticker for your chest. We thought a great first foray for these shirts might be Pride, which is celebrated in the month of June. Chris said that, although there are many products being sold for Pride month, most of them are poorly designed and aesthetic eyesores. (After attending a Pride event, we can attest to this fact.)
So in between other projects, we hustled to get a batch of shirts done. Chris designed. Tom made the silkscreen machine do its magic, built these amazing fixtures and silkscreened signage on plywood. Garrett built up his arm strength silkscreening hundreds of shirts. I played the role of sounding board. All done in time for the Pride festival this weekend.
Not wanting to mix business and politics, we thought it might be best to sell these shirts under a different brand. It’s not that we are ashamed of who we are and what we think, but Wire & Twine appeals to a broad market, and the shirts to perhaps a more narrow segment. There’s the right place for the right product.
So Wearing Your Heart was born. We wanted some thing like “Heart on Your Sleeve” but too many squatters are sitting on all the good URLs, so wearingyourheart.com was the closest we could get. It’s all sitting under the overarching brand, Handmade in Ohio. Later, I will diagram the whole thing for you and then we will have a short quiz.
Today was a short day, with the initial Pride kick-off in the evening, but sales were steady and the booth looked fabulous. And we already have a big list of ideas for how we can improve everything from the displays to inventory control.
We think this could be the start of something good.
(Thanks to Chris for letting steal this image from his blog.)