Guest blog post: Why One Less Bully is important

We received a very special and amazing blog post from one of our fans. Frankly we are one of her biggest fans. You will be too after reading this post:

Hello!

I am @faerierebel and a huge fan of @OneLessNemesis. I admire
wonderful businesses who support my causes, werewolf awesomeness and
the one very close to my heart: bullying and how to weed it out of the
world.

I am a victim of bullying. From first grade to upper level secondary
school, I was bullied. I was the ugly girl, the weirdo, the creep, the
one who should kill herself and be gone, no one wanted me or to be my
friend.

I told my parents, they told me not to listen.
I told my teacher, he told me that a horse kicks out of love too. (A
Finnish saying, meaning the boys liked me, that’s why they bullied
me).

It was always verbal and yes, it hurt. Words HURT. They are the ones
that stick in your brain and make you think maybe you’re not really
worthy. But some words heal too. I escaped into books and rather spent
my days with Mr. Tumnus, Mathilda, The Little Women and libraries than
with actual people. And still do, books rule my life. They helped me
survive and kept me sane. They never called me bad names and were
always there.

Does it get better? How do I answer this? In my case it was
“eventually”. I survived when I finally found friends with same
interests. I owe my life to them forever. They are my brothers and
sisters and always there for me. I gained confidence with them and
allowed myself to trust them and love them. And it paid back. I am now
a strong individual who says what’s on her mind and will never be
silenced or beaten down with words ever again! I found another outlet
that allows me to perform and be my own beautiful self on stage where
a crowd cheers me on and no one calls me ugly.

The answer has to be “yes”. Always yes. No one should be alone, ever.
No child, no adult, no one. No one deserves to be alone.

I am also the person who will stop bullying when seeing or hearing it.
I will go and say or do what I have to. ONE LESS BULLY, period. If we
all stand together, no one has to suffer alone.

Take your stand and stand up against bullying. You will save someone’s
life. Trust me.

Thank you so very much to @faerierebel for sharing her personal story with us. This is really what our One Less Bully design is all about. And she said it so beautifully.

Why It Fits: One Less Bully

While I was taking a shower yesterday evening (this is the location where my only cognitive, intelligent thoughts occur) I was thinking about how I’m going to start tweeting relevant statistics about bullying in schools and how it’s affecting kids today. I started wondering, what is our audience going to think of our emphasis on One Less™ Bully, Stand Together? How will our snowboarders react to these tweets? Will they unfollow us? What about our wolf girls, the ones who have bought our most popular shirt so far. Or our vamp girls? What about all of the new followers that are in the t-shirt biz? Will they be thinking “what the hell are they talking about? I thought they sold t-shirts.”

One of the reasons I was thinking about this is because we cover a lot of different groups. People who are passionate about things they love. And those people are more diverse than the difference between our surf shirt and our zombie shirt (wait, maybe they’re not so different…) Why do we have so many different designs and why are we focusing on One Less Bully now?

Then the answer came to me. I have friends who are into vampires. Friends who would never have anything but a Mac. Friends who only feel free when they’re on the slopes or on the water. Friends who read 50 times more books than me. As unique as we all are, as different as we all appear, we can appreciate each other for the very things that make us different. Those passions that make us read until 3 am or have us yelling at the top of our lungs because we’re a Husky playing against the Cougars. And that’s why One Less Bully makes so much sense. One Less Nemesis celebrates the rivalries that exist between people who really love what they do. They’re passionate about what they love. And they are very individual people. Unique. At some point, we were all that awkward little kid, just trying to figure out what we liked and what we were good at. Bullies don’t like unique. Bullies make it harder for us to find where we belong. They bring us down and stand in our way. But if we stand together, we’re bigger than the bully. We’re strong enough to stop the bullying behaviors that make kids feel so lost and alone. We want those kids to find their way, find their passions and have the times of their lives doing it.

So as we get ready for a presentation to an elementary school on implementing a One Less Bully, Stand Together day at the school (and hopefully many schools), my head is clear. My vision is acute. I know exactly where we’re going and why we’re going there. And I feel so good about it.

Sale on our One Less Bully Shirt!

We're having a sale on our One Less Bully Stand Together shirt. It's only $15 (regularly $24.99) through 3/25/11 whiles supplies last.

We feel like this is such a great and important message. The more people stand together against bullying behaviors, the less power those bullies have. Take away their power and the hurt they cause! One Less Bully - Stand Together!

Don't forget to "Like" us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!

LA Fitness Expo: Another One Under Our Belts

We recently returned from the biggest show that we have participated in, the LA Fitness Expo held at the end of January. Our goal for this show was to expose One Less Nemesis to a large group of people that are in our target market. We want OLN to be a brand people love and want to wear and that takes a lot of exposure. So off to LA we went and we were able to take some major leaps in the right direction (plus we got to drive the coolest, kick ass muscle car! I loved the Dodge Charger, doesn't it look like an OLN kind of car?)

First, we did in fact, build and create our biggest, coolest display yet of the shows we've done over the past year. It took us hours to get the carpet guys to get to our booth and then build the back wall structure completely wrong for 2/3 of it, finally figuring it out on the last tower ("um, these panels have a bunch of little squares and these have big ones....OH those are the sides and these are the bottoms, DAMNIT!") This day caused cuts, bruises, shaky hands and my favorite phrase from Ted, "zip tie the bitch." Of course he was referencing the tower we were building, not someone we held captive and tied to our booth. And in this case the bitch wasn't actually me. Promise.

We also got to meet everyone at Creation Entertainment and tour their office. These are some of the most awesome, entrepreneurial people you will ever hope to meet. We shipped a few things, including our very inexpensive but awesome looking banner there, to one of OLN's BFFs, Amy. Thank you, Amy! We saw Gary, Matt, Adam and the crew. Glendale was lovely.

We also went to the Target in Glendale. Our theory here (and we learned this from another vendor at one of Creation's Star Trek Conventions) was that it would be a lot cheaper to buy inexpensive display components at Target in the city of a convention (under $80) and let them be disposable rather than buy them and ship them all over (we estimated shipping at over $200.) So we went to perhaps the coolest Target I've ever been in. They literally have escalators for the carts. We were amazed (it doesn't take much.) We talked through our display and bought or organized all of the components. We had to ask 3 people to help us find zip ties...ahh, the glory of trade shows. We will always have zip ties in our bags now.

Finally it was show day. Thousands, literally thousands, of people came to the show the first day. A guy walked up to us the very second the show floor opened, told us he loved our tees and bought two immediately. Ted and I looked at each other and thought "here we go!!" We had a great booth, lots of really great feedback and we sold some shirts. Did we totally sell out of shirts like we had dreamed of? Unfortunately, no. Did thousands of people see our shirts and our brand who would have never seen it otherwise? Absolutely. Do we wish that we would experience a sold out, balls to the wall, oh my GOD we're going to run out event? Hell yes. But we have to be realistic. We really accomplished what we meant to accomplish and that was to further our brand. We absolutely believe 100% that this idea and this brand is going succeed. When people get it, they really dig it. And that's how we feel. So we dust off our jeans, take a few to regroup and hit it again with our next strategy because we just know it's going to happen. And by the way, Ted did seem to have some fun while he was there....

Pursuiing our Passion: Sharing the Journey - Starting a Brand

In our first blog post about sharing our journey of building this business, we talked about where the idea for One Less Nemesis came from and how we've come to realize that our brand is truly about pursuing your passions in life. In this post, we're going to talk about the next stage of our brand development, which was the business of starting a business. Ted had this truly amazing idea but there was so much more to be done to put that idea into action. There are so many details, like hiring a lawyer to create a Limited Liability Corporation and then consulting an intellectual properties attorney to trademark the house mark of One Less™ (thankfully, Ted handled all of this before I was even involved).

With those initial important start-up business functions done, Ted needed an artist and a t-shirt printer. He was the man with the idea but he had to have outside help to execute it. First he met with a graphic designer and the ensuing discussion resulted in some interesting original logo designs. I'm not sure how the fighting snakes image first was introduced, but our early logos looked like the circular snakes above. Well....that didn't really work for us. There is a difference between an artist and graphic designer. The graphic designer can make visual art and design without necessarily being a free-hand artist. So we called an artist whose work I had admired for over a year. Tarl Lambson (see his samples and website/contact at www.tarlsscribbles.com) is actually an animator who is uber talented. He first started working on the One Less Skier designs that inspired Ted's idea in the first place. But we really needed a logo so he and I began researching snakes and went through a series of pictures for inspiration like this fighting snake picture. Tarl then gave us some sketches which did not end up being what we chose, but they were so cool...I'm not sure when or how we morphed beyond the snakes but I'm pretty sure Tarl and Ted expressed how they were digging on the bomb. Here is one of the early iterations of bomb variations: Love these guys!!!




Of course, I really liked these versions, but they were thought of as 'flying sp.....' well, you know what we thought.

At the same time, Ted was researching printers in the Seattle area and he met with Gorilla Screen Printing. Ted was adamant about using the discharge process when printing. This process actually removes just a bit of the shirt's dye and embeds the design so when you wash your tee, the design is actually part of the fabric, smooth and soft to the touch. We also went through a few different t-shirt vendors, searching for just the right super-soft, high quality, 100% cotton shirts (the shirt has to be 100% cotton for the discharge ink to work.) We tried American Apparel but in the end, found that JS Apparel shirts fit the best and were the softest.

So we worked to cooperatively design a logo we all loved, found shirts and a printer. We still needed some designs to print on these great shirts! In my next post about sharing our journey, I'll include some of the early designs and how our various passions inspired the wide range of shirts we have today.

Getting Ready for LA FitExpo!

We are only about 3 weeks out from the Los Angeles Fitness Expo and we are stoked! We're getting new shirts printed and tagged, ready for the big show. Because I'm in Indiana and my partner's in Seattle, one of us gets stuck dealing with all of the inventory. Well, that person is NOT ME! (*insert evil laugh here*) To show me just what fun I'm missing, Ted made this little video. He is not quite at ninja folding skillz, but I think he does better than I do...