The Pelican Wall: VG x Loomis Chaffee
@Haydis
It started with an email. Last December, Raina Cox, the bookstore manager at The Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut, wrote to ask if we would meet her at the Tailgate Show. Loomis is a 9–12 prep school with boys' and girls' hockey teams and, in her words, a rabid fan base. She thought our stuff could take the school's hockey merch somewhere new and we very much agreed!
We met in January in Las Vegas at the show and not long after, she sent photos for us to use in the all over print tee shirt to make something truly one of a kind. From there we did what we do with any team we work with, we let the art team do their thing and drew their pelican from scratch, our way, and built a small collection around it:
- Two hats
- One tee
- One hoodie
- One all-over-print tee
All in, we came up with five unique pieces that has its own wall section in the Loomis Chaffee bookstore. Violent Gentlemen, born from Costa Mesa, California, drawn onto a prep-school mascot and sitting in a store 3,000 miles away is crazy to think about – it totally makes me smile.
Why this matters to us
We're making tee shirts. Nobody's life depends on a hoodie. We say that around the office a lot, and we mean it. But it's also why projects like this one matter so much to us. If the product itself isn't the point, then the point has to be the people it ends up on and the places it ends up in.
Hockey lives at every level. The NHL gets the cameras. The AHL gets them too. But that high school rink in Windsor, Connecticut gets parents, classmates and a bookstore manager who knows what her fans want. That is hockey too, and it's the part of the game most of us actually grew up inside.
We draw, we don't just print. The easy version of this project is a Loomis logo slapped onto a blank tee shirt. We didn't want that and neither did they. Drawing the pelican ourselves meant it became a VG piece and a Loomis piece at the same time. That's the only kind of collaboration we're interested in doing and Randy absolutely crushed it for us!
Small and real beats big and generic. Five pieces for one school won't move our numbers. It will mean something to a kid who plays there, a parent who drives to every game, and an alum who walks into that store twenty years from now. We've been doing this for almost fifteen years, and those are the stories that keep us going.
Someone reached out, and we answered. Raina didn't have to send that email. We didn't have to take the meeting. Most of what we're proudest of started exactly this way - somebody in the hockey world asking if we'd do something with them, and us saying yes.
If you run a program, a rink, a team or a store and you've got an idea like this, our door is open. Send the email. We'll meet you there.
Violent Gentlemen
