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!

One Less Bully Design Now Available for Purchase!!

We just added our new One Less Bully design to our website, now available for order! We're pretty excited about this design for a lot of reasons. We originally talked about a shirt with this theme a year ago, but we weren't sure that it would be relevant enough for people to want to buy and wear. A year later, it seems everyone from Ellen to Dr. Phil is talking about bullying. So we started getting feedback from our designers and our followers on Twitter about their ideas and what our design should look like and how we represent this idea.

This was actually a really challenging task. We are by nature kind of a violent brand. I mean, taking out obstacles that stand in your way is not always nice or pretty. But we wanted our message to be one of hope, unity and caring. How do we do that while wanting to stamp out a bully? Surely the little guy beating the crap out of the bully (while a fun thought) is not exactly the way to go here. Then Ted said "what if we had a group of people standing together against a bully? You know, Stand Together to end bullying?" So our crazy creative brief basically said that, along with a few other key phrases like "Bullies Suck."

Designer Daniel Alfaro (see his site: http://alfarodan.blog.com) was first to respond and we are so glad he did. Our One Less Bully, Stand Together design incorporates Ted's vision of people standing together, becoming a larger, stronger entity than the bully (in the form of our bulldog) without using a "violence to battle violence" message. We are truly proud to offer this design. Thank you to Daniel for an amazing job!

Our next step is two-fold: first we want to find an anti-bully organization that we can work with to share part of our proceeds of our shirt sales. @wildwashington on Twitter gave us a great suggestion and Ellen's website has a few organizations as well.

Second, we're working on additional bully designs to launch. We want to have choices with different design aspects to spread the anti-bully message. Look for new designs in this line soon!

To everyone who has retweeted, encouraged and helped us along the way, thank you. We want to make a difference in people's lives, giving them a laugh as they pursue their passions but also supporting the unique individuality that makes us all genuine, passionate people. Bullies are just not part of the program.