OUR STORY

The idea for Patch Apparel started one evening when putting our then 3-year old daughter to bed. She persuaded me to lay with her until she fell asleep which could take anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour. Many nights I wasted this time thinking about all of the chores and work that I needed to be doing. One night though I realized I could take advantage of this few minutes of down time and actually use it to just think about new ideas.

I had been considering getting some t-shirt designs going for a while but I had not come up with any ideas that I thought were new, novel, or cohesive enough to really start something worthwhile. This particular night I started thinking back to my soccer playing days when we used to exchange team patches with the other team at the end of our games. After many years and wide travels as a soccer player, I had a pretty nice collection of interesting and unique patches. These patches made for a good collectible item because they were all so different and each had a story associated with it. This is the feel that I wanted to create in a t-shirt and it was a feeling I had about my favorite t-shirts that I had loved in the past - T-shirts with simple designs that were unique, had a story associated with them, and felt like a collectible.

As I focused in on the patch idea and tripped around the word ‘patch’ a bit, I stumbled on to “Patch Up The Planet” and the idea of establishing designs that highlighted causes that could make things better in our world with a portion of the proceeds going to support these causes. My thinking here started with the environment and almost immediately expanded to thinking about other 'unsung' causes as well that will help improve the quality of life for people in the U.S. and around the world. The causes behind these t-shirts give each shirt “a story” and should provide everyone who wears one with the good feeling that they are contributing to helping some very worthy causes. There is a lot of gloom and doom out there in the world today, but there are a lot of great people working to grow small change into big change – we just don’t hear often enough about these folks in the news. So hopefully, our products can help highlight the positive side of what is going on out there and contribute to making things better.

Our beginnings will be very humble with the idea of starting small - every little bit helps - and aspiring to grow so that we can really have an impact on the positive causes we are supporting. We’re starting with t-shirts but I envision a much wider range of products in the future (including collectible patches) along with some fun and interesting fundraising events to further provide assistance to these great causes and hopefully help us all lighten up for a few minutes.

So, buy a shirt or two or three, spread the word, and help us Patch Up the Planet.