Every so often you find yourself in situations you never thought you would find yourself in… running a clothing brand is one of those situations.
So how did we get here?
Myself and Adam started Merch Stall because it ticked the boxes on the type of people we’d get to work with, and being our own bosses certainly had it’s perks too. We both come from creative backgrounds, myself from touring and playing music, Adam, from art & design. Merch Stall has definitely complimented the worlds we’ve come from.
Working with inspiring and creative people and printing their work, has somewhat created an unexpected creative itch that needed scratching. Printing every day meant the creative itch was getting bigger and bigger by the hour, and the unused ideas were starting to get even more frustrating, unused. A few brands coming through the workshop with awesome concepts and enthusiasm, were really the last straw and tipped us over the edge. So what next… no one wants a T-shirt with Merch Stall on it. We needed a creative arm, our own brand, our own name & identity to showcase the best things we can achieve in the workshop, and hopefully get some people excited along the way. So we came up with ‘…As Thieves’.
Why ‘…As Thieves’?
As I eluded to in the opening sentence, running a clothing brand is not the first thing I expected to find myself doing. All of my creative outlets have been musically led, with the focus on promoting music and gigs. With any of these things, keeping them boxed as hobbies has not been my style. I’ve thrown myself at them, and hoped that in some way they have been able to support me so I can do them forever. Two factors have impacted that idiotic reckless abandon, over recent years: firstly, hurtling into my 30’s with the pace of a three legged dog that just got a wheel where his old leg was, ‘aint no stopping that guy; Secondly, all you tight gits* don’t spend money on music anymore. Which in part, at the end of a long story that bares no relevance to this blog, is why i find myself printing T-shirts.
Through my journey, I have realised a few things: Many bands are selling more T-shirts than CD’s now; also, not everyone wants to own a band T-shirt or wear one all the time. We as people, on the most part, like to express ourselves through the clothes we wear, and not everyone wants to walk about pledging their allegiance to a band or a scene or whatever it may be associated with. Some people just want to look nice, but have a bit of something they are attached to involved with the clothing. We’re not all going to turn up to work in our latest ‘Pizza Tramp’ shirt, but we might like to wear a subtle T-shirt designed by an artist from one of the bands we like, or associated with the scene we follow.
It’s this realisation that has fed the desire to make ‘…As Thieves’
In Part 2, we’ll discuss overcoming the crippling self doubt of doing something new, why you need to indulge your ethos, and how we began launching everything.
*not everyone, i know YOU still buy CD’s
