As it stands, Ripe Culture is nearly nine months in the making. That's nine months of meetings, creating, selling, and conceptualizing where we want this company to go. That's also nine months of laughing, yelling, and pulling our hair out over late night emails and happy hour video chats from the US to Bermuda. Lest anyone think a meeting should be held without a beer in hand, they'd be wrong. It seems fittingly ironic that it also happens to take 9 months to grow a human being. Mom and Dad do their thing and nine months later, give or take a few weeks, a baby is born. Ripe Culture is our baby at the moment. Everyone here at Ripe has been working on our brand in some fashion every day since May 2012. We have had some pretty great ideas, and we've also had some ideas and concepts that never really took flight or sort of just fizzled out. It's a long process but we keep trucking along! Through it all, we've gotten amazing support and feedback from our community and we cannot wait to keep making moves and building our company so that it can make you as happy as it makes us.
Like any other type of business, there are so many ups and downs of starting a clothing company. First off, people need to like what you're doing since all of you guys and gals are going to be the ones keeping us in business. The first 8 months, leading up to the creation of the shirts you are going to see on our website, was a lot of trial and error. Simply put, some shirts work and some just don't. We printed nearly 400 shirts and took them to the streets. Living in a beach community during the summer, tourists are always looking to buy, especially if it's local. We sold shirts. We sold a lot of shirts. We sold some almost immediately while other styles and designs didn't really move as quickly as we would have thought. That's initially a bummer, but in the long run it's such a huge help to the progression of Ripe Culture. The shirts that sold the fastest and received the biggest accolades are the shirts that helped design the new line we have coming out. Every design you will see from us, here on out, will have a little bit of the customer in it. That's because the shirts we design will be directly influenced in part by you.
That's one of the coolest things about Ripe Culture. We want you to be involved! If you're all going to be the ones wearing our gear, why can't you help us design it? In the future, we are going to be posting designs and shirt concepts on our various social media outlets and you guys will help us decide what to print! We WANT you to send us pictures, videos, or anything you think fits the Ripe Style. If you think it's Ripe, we want it! That's the kind of stuff that's going to inspire our creative process. And you can expect more pictures from us. We want all of you to see just what happens behind the scenes, because some of it is just too hilarious and outrageous to keep hidden. The more you love your job, the more it shows in your product. Having fun is one of the job requirements here at Ripe Culture. Don't forget to keep tuned about the new line! Catch ya later!
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