Hubwear has been in existence for several months now and at launch it had its 15 clicks of fame. It got bounced around on a few blogs and with each new mention, the traffic to the site went up and up. I use ’sitemeter’ to track how many visitors I get and the graph showing the traffic was equivalent to my happiness.
Each peak was an emotional high and each lull was a low for me too. Ahh… the joys of riding nano-sized internet fame.
Things of course died down very quickly and I went back to work, printing orders, sketching up new ideas and working on the structure of the next few rounds. I am proud to say that we’ve now seen a great new development in the flexibility of the ‘routes’ we can offer. You can now mix and match over 20 airports for our Economy routes. But best of all, we are now offering fully customizable First Class shirts. Any city to any city.
But everything else aside, a small dream that I’d been keeping in the back of my head finally came true the other night. Obviously, despite having loftier goals of taking over the world (one shirt at a time), my little mini-dream was to walk down the street one day and see a complete stranger wearing one of my shirts. Seeing one of your mates wearing one is totally different to seeing someone that you’ve never met rocking one of your shirts.
And on Saturday night, it came true. I literally stopped in my tracks and I turned to Sara and said, “Look!”
We went in and casually asked the dude, ‘Hey man, where’d you get that shirt?”, relishing every minute of this of course.
He replies, “Oh my wife bought it for me at the Renegade Craft Fair”
At this point, I can’t keep it in any more and blurt out, “I made that shirt by the way” trying to keep my cool.
“Oh wow!” His mates go nuts. He goes nuts. I go nuts.
Eventually, I ask him, “So, why ORD-LGA?”
“Oh, I used to live there and I go back to New York a lot.”
“Cool. Good to meet you man”.
We chatted a little more and one of his mates takes a photo of us together (Sara took this one) but the really weird part of the whole thing was just how similar we looked. He wore a jacket over his jeans, he was Asian, he had trendy designer glasses…weird huh? I have worn almost his entire ‘look’ many times before… do all trendy Asians dress alike?
Hearing his story about the route is really what makes this whole idea so much fun for me. Knowing that each shirt can mean completely different things to different people is one of the most satisfying aspects of this concept. At the Renegade Craft Fair a few weeks ago (hubwear’s first public appearance), Sara and I met so many people and heard so many stories of why they loved our shirts.
“My parents make this trip every year”
“We’re making this trip as a family”
“I want my boyfriend to move here, so make it a one-way”
“I have a winter home there…”
But the best one was an interchange between a young girl and her mother. They both got the concept right away and I heard the young girl say to her mother, “Look, ORD-LHR! I want that one. Now I’ve got to go to London!”
If that doesn’t pull on your heart strings then you should start watching the Oxygen Network.
