LOOK 0125: The Very Beginning
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Words by: CL
This all started when I drew a drawing of mushrooms on a piece of paper and thought it'd look good on a shirt. I had one brown t-shirt from a Uniqlo sale bin that I had bought for $3. The drawing was made up of a handful of unconnected shapes. Each shape was a piece of the design: a stem of the mushroom, the folds beneath and a few other miscellaneous floating shapes. I had watched a friend print a shirt once before and remembered the process in my head; the next day I was buying supplies. One wooden 14"x22" screen, a shitty plastic squeegee and a small container of white ink. I cut out each of the shapes one by one; they were all so small I could barely see the shapes themselves. I placed the stencil on the shirt with the screen on top and pulled my very first line of ink down that brand new wooden screen. I was ecstatic. It was perfect. But the dream of Thick Mint Co. didn't come around until about four years later. When I made that first mushroom shirt, all I thought was that these would make nice gifts for those cool people in my life.
And for years, I did just that. I made shirts for people (mostly family)- for their birthday, to say thank you or just when I felt like giving someone something. Every time I made something, it got better and better. Designs started to mesh together. I tried sweatshirts, t-shirts, tote bags and then one day I was missing some friends and wanted to make another set of t-shirts to give them for Christmas. I made the design you see below and sent it in the mail. A couple of weeks later, I got a photo from them wearing my shirts, smiles across their faces with a text that said "sell these" and thought it was so cool that something I made is being worn on a different body, in a different space. When I went back to school after that winter break, I met up with these friends for our weekly Sunday surf and started dreaming up Thick Mint. She had just gotten a new board, a 9'8 mint colored longboard. She said it was like a thin mint, only thick (you can guess the rest). So the name Thick Mint was born and the shirts came next. We started calling our Sunday surf sessions "business meetings" when all we really did was surf, then eat and talk maybe two whole sentences about actually making Thick Mint a reality. I moved into a house that semester- my last semester in college- and had brought my screen and squeegee with me in case I needed more gifts. My sister had bought some blank t-shirts for me in Maine from a hardware store called Reny's and I had brought those with me as well. My friend sent me a Google slide of logo ideas which consisted of "Thick Mint" in various fonts and that was when it got real. A logo. A logo somehow makes everything real. It's like an identity stamp, a birthmark of a business. From then on, I started drawing up more designs and printing them on the blank shirts I had. The same friend then started giving me blank shirts from work that they were no longer using and with materials in hand, ideas floating around and a big floor space to work, Thick Mint Co. was officially born. Out of my college bedroom in a small back house in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, I started printing t-shirts and selling them to friends. That semester I dragged two more friends out to the beach at sunset to shoot some photos of them wearing some Thick Mint gear. For Thick Mint's very first photoshoot, we danced around Zuma beach with just three shirts in hand until the sun went down and the sand went cold. Thick Mint is still growing but that's the story of the very beginning. One mushroom shirt and a weird tendency to gift giving, a friend with a fat longboard to push me forward, some "business meetings" and a logo. That's all it was- to make and to give, to laugh and smile and dance until dark. |
