St. Thomas seniors Chris Cho and Harrison Muller have developed a unique clothing brand that features themed collections.

Muller and Cho connected with the streetwear-meets-punk/grunge look and decided to combine it with their own styles. Their brand focuses on creating unique pieces and building a community.

“BlestSinners was a way for us to put the way that we felt as an individual into sort of a brand so that other people could be a part of it,” Muller said.

The name of the brand is an oxymoron: the concepts of blessed and sinner contradict each other.

“Everyone is born as a sinner and everyone sins, but we consider ourselves to be blessed,” Cho said.

“Looking around at a place like St. Thomas, we have so much to be thankful for, yet we mess up everyday and we always make mistakes,” Muller said. “But it’s just a more raw interpretation of live your life, you’re blessed, you’re a sinner but embrace that, take it one day at a time.”

Cho and Muller met during their sophomore year and bonded over their unique styles.

“Fashion and image is the first thing you notice about someone,” Muller said. “Me and Chris — we can tell right away like this is a dude I can for sure see myself hanging out with.”

Each piece has a red tag that represents the brand. The tag is sewn onto the piece where a regular clothing tag would go, but on the outside. It will say 1/8 or 1/16 so the wearer can know that the piece is only one out of eight produced.

“One of the biggest things that we try to focus on is making every single piece limited,” Cho said. “For the first public release, only eight T-shirts were released and those all immediately sold out.”

Their first collection, Purgatory, dropped on Aug. 9, 2019. The second collection, titled Apocalypse, was released on Sept. 2, 2019.

Apocalypse is based on the four horsemen of the apocalypse and coincidentally, there are four members of the company. Cho and Muller work with St. Thomas senior Austen Duncan, who does graphics for the brand, and Stamati Morellas, from Iowa, who does their social media.

Hype for the brand is created through the BlestSinners Instagram page. A lookbook of the full collection can be found on their website. When a collection is dropped, customers can direct message the brand and reserve a piece.

Most buyers are local so Muller and Cho can hand-deliver the pieces and connect with their customers.

“We don’t want someone to just buy a shirt to buy a shirt, we want them to be involved with us, and if they’re following our page then they’re more likely to believe in what we believe in too,” Muller said.

While the T-shirts sold for about 40 dollars, buyers saw it more as supporting a brand to see how it can grow, rather than just spending 40 dollars on a shirt, according to Cho.

“We didn’t really make this to make money, we made this because we want to put ourselves out there and put our art out there,” said Cho. “I find that fashion is the biggest way of self-expression.”

Cho explained how even those who have modeled for the brand may not typically dress that way, but modeling the clothing can be a bridgeway into dressing in Blest Sinners clothing or realizing that they can dress in different ways.

“So many people are so afraid of like ‘oh I can’t wear this, that’s not me,’ but I think that it’s more of the confidence behind it, which is how people can pull off things,” Cho said. “So many people are afraid of that whole concept of self-expression and I feel like that is the drive of who makes who, what makes a person a person.”

At the end of the day, Cho and Muller say you can wear whatever you want.

“You can judge a person based off their image, but there’s always going to be so many other layers beneath that,” Muller said. “I feel like fashion is a way to bridge into that, to being able to genuinely express yourself and embrace yourself for who you are.”

Junior communication and journalism major Shae McLean modeled for BlestSinners’ first line, Purgatory.

“It was so fun, the atmosphere was so authentic and cool. They made me feel super just myself,” McLean said. “Their line is super unique and I just like that they are taking an entrepreneur side of things and creating something for themselves.”

McLean said that the line diversifies what most college students are wearing. McLean got a T-shirt from doing the photoshoot.

“I actually wear my T-shirt all the time. I’ve had people ask me, ‘where did you get that?’ because it is so different,” McLean said. “They’re super authentic, they’re new but everybody should give them a look because it’s little brands that start up like this that blow up and I think Chris and the brand as a whole has a lot of potential to become very successful.”

“We’re about the community and the relationships, and we really want to focus on giving people an opportunity,” Muller said. “Maybe we can lead by example and show them that, ‘hey like this is how we want to express ourselves and you guys can be a part of this too.’”

Rachel Torralba can be reached at torr3544@stthomas.edu.