Apparel
HIFI CLOTHING CO.
Founding | Management | Design | eCommerce | Charity
In a time before smart phones, one of the first things I made as a freshly minted designer was a shirt for a friend's band. I know, so original, but that really sealed the deal for me. Making logos and posters was cool and I made plenty of those too, but a t-shirt was like a logo AND a poster that you could WEAR. Since then, I've messed around with a couple of garage-born tee startups. The first venture, called Think Tank Threads, was based in Taiwan while I was living there. HIFI Clothing Co. was the second of these endeavors, based out of Denver. What I learned with TTT was that making tees under a label was a ton of fun. Also a ton of work for not much money. So for HIFI, instead of focusing on the money, I raked in all the fun and donated all proceeds to various charities. It's a terrible business model, but a great way to give random ideas a home while supporting good causes. HIFI's tagline is 'designs for elevated minds', so you can probably guess what that meant for a Colorado-centric operation. If you can't guess, you're in luck - a bunch of the designs are below.
Live sales
Though a majority of the wares were sold online, you could also find HIFI tees popping up at events along the front range from 2018-19 before covid hit. In my experience, selling directly to cool people who want to buy and wear things that came out of your brain and got printed on a tee will always delight the shit out of me.
Results
To date, I’ve put around 100 designs on various textiles between TTT and HIFI. They’ve been labors of love and something about that must resonate, as TTT sold out all the products we printed, and HIFI was inducted into the ‘Top Shops Club’ on Threadless in the first year of business. Despite discontinuing on-site vending thanks to Covid, and stepping back to focus on other projects, the online shop continues to generate regular sales both near and far with customers in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Egypt, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Greenland, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, and Taiwan.
