How did I come about creating the brand PUSHMETAL anyway?

Have you ever had something just keep you up at night?

Like a nagging that won’t go away. An idea that keeps swirling in your mind, heart, and guts.

Where do you even start? How do you even start to make this idea move? You think to yourself “ahh it will never work anyways so why bother”. Ok but maybe…what if…

I was there! We are no different!

I mean what the heck did I know about selling Merchandise anyways. All I knew is I had this idea that I couldn’t shake night and day. It would just eat at me.

Back in the beginning of 2017 I made my first move! I contacted a local screen-printing company and

asked for some catalogs. I already could picture my logo, the colors, where I wanted my placements to be. I started calling people in the industry I was working in and had repour with and my main questions were:

*What are your favorite fitting shirts and hats and why?

*What are your two go-to colors to wear while working?

*What are your favorite things you love about your favorite fitting shirts and hats.

Then I went to work. I called and scheduled an appointment and sat with a designer at the screen-printing shop, we navigated my ideas. It had to right…it had to be the exact thing that kept me up at night. I needed the ideas to leave my busy mind and be in front of me. I’ve never felt so impatient. BAM there it was!! I couldn’t believe it! Right there in front of me…the font, the colors, the placements exactly how I had imagined them. I remember pacing around the room as he was finalizing and saving the files. I was on top of the moon. I spent an extra two hours there in the corner of the room looking through the material information in the catalogs and stepping into the showroom/lobby to explore sample pieces they had hanging. I thought since I had spent all day there, I wasn’t leaving without placing my order.

I took the information I learned from my peers regarding size, fit, and material and compared what I could order through the companies in the catalogs, and I MADE MY FIRST ORDER. I was 3 weeks away from having merchandise in my hands. A huge achievement I thought. Until the unsettling feeling of… okay what now.

I had decided at that point to go ahead and start sending mockup pictures out within days into Forums to show people what was coming in and I started pumping into social media. Man, the response was amazing! People couldn’t wait until the merch showed up so they could buy it. When the shirts and hats arrived, I displayed them in a certain way to take pictures for my first Shopify E-Commerce store that I had built out and of course re-post everything into Forums and social media.

After about 30 days of intaking, packaging, and mailing orders, I soon discovered I was bored. Oh man what was I doing. I thought there is no way I can JUST sell shirts and hats. Oh boy I would toss and turn at night knowing it had to mean something (my effort…not the profit). Everything… it all had to mean something. I NEEDED to bring life to this idea that had lived inside of me just over two months ago. My mind was spinning!

AH-HA! I had it! What am I about? If I had to describe myself, what would those words be?

I thought to myself; I work hard everyday at home and at work, I have dreams/desires that I envision that help me keep going, and I go beyond what others do. Man, the journey I have lived so far has been so trying and extreme. But I just keep going…somehow, someway I just keep going.

In that moment the words Grind, Desire, and Perseverance were attached to the brand PUSHMETAL. I knew right away this is what the brand should be about.  I knew that people would resonate with the brand long term if I just made sure to create something that they were about as well.

I exposed the tagline and people started to cling to that as a lifestyle brand. A brand they could call their own because that’s what they were about too.