I have been asked “What made you decide to start a business selling t shirts about 100 times since I started in late 2020. I am not a huge “talker” and I see modesty as a virtue so I always give a short answer, which goes something like this:

I bought a He-Man t-shirt at a small shop when I was in college. One day I wore it to a theme park and 6 people asked me where I got it. That gave me the idea that no one knew where to get it and maybe I could sell them on the web. So I made a deal with the store where I bought it to get a bulk discount, put up some Ebay listings and a rudimentary website, and it just grew from there.

Besides being an incredibly lame way of describing the founding of a fun company, this response doesn’t even answer “Why?”, it answers “How?” more than anything else.

It Is Your Destiny

When Darth Vader said “It is your destiny” to Luke Skywalker, he meant that simply by virtue of being the son of Anakin Skywalker he was destined to follow his footsteps and join him. My destiny was formed by a number of circumstances, and I’ll detail them below.

Born in ‘76

It helped that I was born into the golden age of action figures. Being born in 1976 meant that Kenner was kickstarting the action figure craze with Star Wars shortly after I was born.

It took Hasbro and Mattel a few years to figure out how to launch their own franchises to compete with Star Wars, but they eventually came out strong and in perfect timing for me to get sucked in. The Masters of the Universe line was first and it became my obsession. I had just about every figure, playset, and vehicle that came out until the time when I became too cool to like kids’ toys.

In addition to playing and watching He-Man, I watched shows like Transformers, GI JOE, and ThunderCats. I never had a single GI JOE or ThunderCats figure, but I had quite a few Transformers including my favorites: the Dinobots and Constructicons.

This is how I spent my time. Notice that the character Whiplash rides Godzilla. I always felt like they were related.

Small Business is in my Blood

My father was a hustler. He maintained a full-time job as a mechanical engineer despite not having an engineering degree AND he did consulting work on the side AND our house had a laundromat in the front yard. I saw running a small business as normal, because I viewed myself and my family as normal.

Not Going to Stop

It’s been a crazy ride since then. 2021 was our highest revenue year and then competition continued to grow and we struggled to get back to that level. We had to make some major changes to how we do business, but we weathered that storm and things are going really well. 2023 ended up being our best year ever since 2021 and we are excited for the future!

I feel so lucky to have a business where I can provide people who love the same things I love with a way to share their memories with the world.

I plan on offering retro t-shirts for as long as I can, and not just because the alternative is to get a job. After all, I am where I am supposed to be and doing what I am supposed to be doing.

It is, afterall,
my destiny.

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