Social cues and pressures can often influence fashion choices, but a clothing line designed by three St. Thomas students attempts the opposite—to encourage individuality.
St. Thomas juniors Marcus Alipate, Dillon Farley and sophomore Alex Puff will launch the website for their clothing brand, True You, the first week of November.
The trio didn’t create the company looking for easy money, rather, the main motive is to shed the cliches of dressing like ones’ social group.
“In high school, you were known as, like, ‘an athlete.’ To me, I didn’t want to be labeled as an athlete,” Alipate said. “You should be whoever you want to be. Don’t feed into what society tells you to do—be different.”
True You will initially offer T-shirts for $15 and sweatshirts for $40. The website will sell a variety of different colors with the company’s name on the front. Farley said that there will be pictures on the website by the site’s launch, with more detailed pictures to follow after they receive their first shipment on Nov. 7.
The students created the clothing line to be more than an online website where students can buy clothes and leave. Puff said they envision the website as an online community where users can compliment and comment on other peoples’ styles.
“It’s not just clothing; it’s a community,” Puff said. “You’re going on there because you want to be on there. You want to see what’s going on.”
The trio contracted an Apple Valley, Minn. company to supply most of the material, allowing them to stay close to St. Thomas and support local communities—two factors the students said were important to them.
The group is working with Jared Grier, a 2013 University of Minnesota graduate. Grier visited the members of True You at St. Thomas as a practicing entrepreneur. He will be fulfilling the company’s manufacturing needs after starting his own screen printing company, Press Coverage, last fall.
“The big thing we want is for people to be individualized … who they are, who they want to be, and what they want people to see them as,” Farley said. “We also want people to support others in what they’re doing and to make sure (people) aren’t judging each other.”
True You is planning on releasing a video soon, along with holding some type of event on campus to market the brand to St. Thomas students.
The website will feature inspirational quotes, pictures and videos of people who are using the product and why they are. The options for buying T-shirts and sweatshirts will be basic, but the line’s creators said they hope to expand the site’s size in proportion to the growth of the “movement.”
“We’re going to start with a few colors, a few different things … then we’ll move into people being able to customize their own colors and do what they want,” Farley said.
Alipate said there is one major factor that sets the line apart from others.
“A lot of people when they go into clothing is for the fashion side of it,” Alipate said. “Ours is more of a movement.”
Joey Anderson can be reached at ande9008@stthomas.edu.