Expressive clothing for makers, by a maker, and always with a twist
I’m the great-grandson of a haberdasher, as I keep telling my wife. And my mother was an obsessive maker – she used to have her own children’s clothing line and quilted, crocheted, knitted, and sewed her whole life, until her last days at 92.
In the past few years, I have reconnected with my forebearers and have been inspired to design some clothing.
Start small
I’m a maker, and I enjoy bringing creativity, cheek, and thought to what I make. I have big plans for a haberdashery, but decided to start small and focus on serving folks like me: Makers.
I started with shirts. While the t-shirt market is saturated to no end, I don’t see many maker-focused t-shirts. I could be wrong, but certainly my niche is special.
With a twist
As for style, I am always a bit cheeky and love playing with visuals, words, and sayings. Many of my more popular designs are hand-drawn illustrations of circuits, components, chips, or dev boards. But I also have ones that are twists on sayings or other popular designs - maker-focused, naturally.
Of course, I’ll need to see what works, what resonates, and if there’s any any any interest. Haha. Then I can expand to other products with the same theme and cheek.
Build notes
All makers like to share how they build things. And I’ve built a good design flow – from idea to sketches to layouts to listing.
For inspiration, I look for things that are visually appealing, have some sort of story, and pay a lot of attention to what folks wear, what shirts they have, and what they say.
For designing, I use an iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and Adobe Fresco for my hand-drawn work. Adobe Fresco has the right pencil styles for me, and ability to do layers and output in various formats (not to mention the price is right). I have InkScape on my MacBook for laying things out and image manipulation. And have used a bunch of cool fonts from Google Fonts (what a great resource).
Next steps
I’m excited to start on this journey. The idea has been burning in my head for a long time and good to see things progressing.
Now to promote the store, keep adding designs, and hopefully make lots of sales. Haha.
I look forward, tho, to the feedback and guidance of customers and enthusiasts, like you, as I take this further. So feel free to comment here in my Etsy store or my blog, or hit me up on Bluesky or Instagram.
Cheers,
Charlie
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Grey and Slate, Haberdashers
Owner and Designer
Store: https://greyandslate.com
Blog: https://greyandslate.com/blog/
Bluesky: @greyandslate.bsky.social
Instagram: @greyandslate
