Who's behind JesusBranded
JesusBranded is the joint effort of a computer programmer and an illustrator to explore the Christian faith through visual means. Through their thoughts and design work, they hope to begin and continue transparent dialogues about faith, life, and God and inch closer to helping all of us understand one another.Salil Jain is a Computer Science Engineer graduate with undercover business savant, whose kidney disease was supposed to kill him at the age of 13 but for the miraculous healing of God; he was a pivotal spearhead of a 2005 revival at the University of Washington called “Shakina”, and has since sincerely pursued Christ through thick and thin.
Sam Franada is a Visual Communication and Illustration graduate with no business sense but with plenty of artistic sensibilities to more than make up for it, moodswings included; he seems to always involve himself in the arts, which provides an interesting and eclectic lens through which to show Christ through.
Both are co-founders of JesusBranded. They are friends 99.9% of the time. They have arrived at this point after a very interesting journey over the years; read about the humble beginnings, the trials, and the victories of JesusBranded here.
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PREFACE: The Collision of Dreams and Reality
There are only two of us left.It's a funny and common misconception that JesusBranded is this large machine churning out Christian t-shirts through a vast team of designers, businessmen, marketing strategists, and customer service associates; the truth is, we were often far from it. Armed with just enough grit (like 3 all-nighters in a row to launch this website in time for Christmas) to go with an enormous amount of His grace (like the last-minute, just-the-right-amount-of-money, company-saving Acquire The Fire Merch account that God miraculously handed to us), we have fiercely fought for our vision only to always receive just enough to both give back to the Orphanage Project and barely keep ourselves afloat. There have been no gigantic payouts, no excessive habits, no decadent lifestyles that would have marked the corporate image some may have had of us; rather, the opposite has been true for most team members that have shared in this vision of JesusBranded- living minimally, sacrificing real paychecks and security in hopes that what we love may eventually become our livelihood. What began as a wunderteam of idealistic college kids ultimately splintered against the weight of our actual dreams, and through a series of misadventures spurred by distractions of all sorts, there are only two of us left.
And its with our backs against the wall that we tell you the story behind JesusBranded- our origins, hopes, failings, victories, and the continuous struggle to become what it's really supposed to be. After all, we built these dreams with you in mind, so its fitting that you get to know us from the beginning.
CHAPTER 1: Dreams, Coffee, and Sketches On A Napkin…
(written by Salil)I’d like to tell you that JesusBranded was first conceptualized by an all-star team of Christian designers, but that just wouldn’t be the truth. The first instantiation of JesusBranded was me (a computer engineer) and a pre-dental student meeting every few days at a quaint Seattle coffee shop and doodling in a sketchbook.
The best thing that came out if it was probably a three pane stickfigure ‘freestyle worship’ design that I still think is awesome, but Sam tends to disagree with me on. Needless to say, things didn’t get that far – though another friend also contributed a spiffy notebook full of cute patterns that gave me a bit of hope, that first insanitation quickly fizzled and flopped.
I had graduated from college by then, and was doing everything I could to delay entering my job as a consultant in the ‘real world’. I moved on to take an internship in Philadelphia with my cousin’s real estate business. I got there in September and was slated to stay for three months, but about two or three days in I realized that his world was a brutal one that I wasn’t so interested in. At the same time though, I was learning and maturing a ton from all the hard work, and there was enough change in me that when I went home for my birthday in October, my sister was willing to give me seed money to startup JesusBranded.
Not being the type of guy who likes doing things alone, I called up my friend Carl and pitched the idea to him. Surprisingly enough, he was on board (Carl is not Christian!) and off to the races we went!
Well..not really. Again, we were faced with the same problem JesusBranded faced in its first instantiation – neither Carl nor I had any sense of design whatsoever. But, by the grace of God, we knew there was an amazingly talented artist at my church, Haley Ha. I put in a call to Haley and we arranged to meet her at a café in downtown Seattle (yeap, us Seattle-ites love our cafes). She went into the meeting without knowing what to expect, but walked out a part of JesusBranded!
After Haley joined on, we took the $2500 investment money from my sister and bought ourselves a fancy computer and monitor with full intention of returning it for a less fancy one within the 14 days allotted. Unfortunately, me being me, I took it in on the 15th day and we ended up instead with over a thousand dollars of BestBuy credit... and there went 50% of our startup capital!
Now that JesusBranded had a designer, all we needed was design concepts. Unfortunately, this was an area that me and Carl did not excel in – but somehow thought we did. We compiled a list of nearly 100 ideas and then I took off for India to find us a manufacturer, dropping Haley a quick email asking if she could ‘crank out the designs in a few days’... An impossible task for a team of designers, let alone a single student! I don’t know this for a fact, but my intuition tells me that after reading that email she was reduced to nothing more than a puddle of tears in the corner of her studio.
A fighter though, Haley did what she could, though we never actually went on to produce those shirts (sorry Haley!). We also got a contract to make shirts for Kings Fools, an amazing local band we all loved and my goal was to produce those while I was in India. The only problem was, I knew nothing about how to get t-shirts made in India, and the manufacturers I found on Google were all looking for us to make 10,000 shirts, not the 100 we could afford!
Somehow though, by the grace of God, my cousin had a friend who had a friend who knew a few guys who lived in a city known for making t-shirts. As soon as we found out about the connections, my dad and I flew out to meet the manufactures. We had a full day planned, but within the first few minutes of meeting the first guy, Ramesh, my dad and I knew that he was the right man for the job (and he was willing to do it!) so we hopped right back on a plane and went home knowing God had provided.
Carl emailed our initial order to the Ramesh, and before I left India, our manufacturer sent the final product over to me – only one problem...none of the shirts fit right!!! Thankfully, our friends and the fans of the band were supportive, and we sold enough to break even. That scare then set us off on our journey to make the perfect t-shirt, one that would lead Carl & I to measure 100’s of t-shirts, ask 10’s of strangers we didn’t know to be fit models for us, and pull all our hair out.
Meanwhile, some interesting things started happening on the design side of things...
CHAPTER 2: A Senior Thesis Hanging On A Thread...
(written by Sam)There are those times when life just hits the fan and you're thrown around in pieces all over the place. That was pretty much how my '04-05 academic year went.
I was a senior at Cornish College of the Arts enjoying my relatively successful academic career when a quick succession of highly unfortunate events began to catch up with me and unravel my comfortable world: I had just ignorantly destroyed a very important relationship in my life, and just weeks later, a very dear uncle of mine had suddenly passed away. Along with the mounting pressures of my final year in school, I had all of a sudden begun losing the plot. I became an emotional wreck, and when all my well-intentioned religious remedies failed, all that I boasted about knowing was reduced to a rubble of questions, anxiety, and doubts. Without much to be confident in, I began to doubt other areas of my life, and eventually decided to give up on Design, seeing it as pointless if I no longer had anything so say.
I also decided to leave my parents' church in search of something more, consequently leading me to my older sister's college church: a spirit-filled, evangelical community of believers who breathed and spoke the freedom of Christ. It was there that God decided to bring healing between Him and I, and He decided that a part of that process was to include my eventual introduction to three very promising business partners who, incidentally, just happened to need help in creatively directing their budding t-shirt project...
Needless to say, the process of creating JesusBranded began. Our team of four (Salil Jain, CEO; Carl Ng, former VP; Haley Ha, former artist) met in the evenings after school and began branding and shaping the vision, throwing around ideas that ranged from the inane ("The Devil Can Kiss My Ass" with a drawing of Jesus riding on a donkey) to the aesthetically lacking (Salil's "freestyle worship" cartoon with stick figures) to the understatedly effective (printing "Amen" on the chest of a shirt). We began the project in January 2005 and for the following 3 months we dedicated our evenings putting together what all of you now know as The Originals: JesusBranded's First Collection; and with Salil having secured a relationship with a family-owned manufacturer in India, we found ourselves quickly moving closer to making our vision a reality.
Through our project, my fractured relationship with Design slowly got restored, and I began integrating my design work for JesusBranded with my upcoming senior thesis show. The mess that I had become earlier in the year had been restored back to life by discovering that my heart could only be captivated by Design when the ideas I'm communicating are dear to me, shaping my design methodologies to this day. As I wrapped up my undergraduate career with a successful show, I also at the same time finished out the loose ends with the JesusBranded project; with all the designs finished and in production, all that was left was to wait out the summer to see if this project would ever lead to anything. In that time, feeling that my initial contribution had run its course, I parted ways with the team and took a three-week trip to the Philippines to go and find myself some more. It wasn't until I got back that I got to hear about JesusBranded's introduction to the Christian Community through Creation Fest West at the Gorge; and, oh my, what an introduction it was...
CHAPTER 3: A Sold-Out Summer...
(written by Salil)Fits were seriously going to be the end of us; we just could NOT figure it out. What made the problem even worse though was that we had a timeline – JesusBranded was registered to be an exhibitor at Creation Fest West and we needed shirts to sell! Carl and I scrambled, we tried measuring competitors shirts but we realized that with an international error tolerance of 5%, a small can be as big as a large or a large as small as a small (next time you’re in a store, take a look at the t-shirt sizing and you’ll be surprised!) Carl and I even set up post at the University of Washington Computer Engineering building and bribed people to try on shirts with free pizza! To be honest, we had a hard time asking girls...its not the most normal thing for a strange Indian guy and a Chinese guy to walk up to a girl and ask if she wants to try on some shirts in exchange for a slice of pie! Eventually, we got measurements we were comfortable enough with and we sent them out to the manufacturer for a full sample run. Little did we know, however, that t-shirts aren’t as simple as measurements – the front and back panels are entirely different, the shape of the armhole can make a world of difference, and there are tons of other little variables that can make or break the fit (I’ll spare you all the details!).
So we got the samples in the mail – a thousand or so of them, and we realized that the fit just wasn’t right! That put us in a tough situation, because there was no way we could fix things in time for creation, and yet we wanted to make a big bang at the festival. We came up with a solution – we would sell off the 1000 samples and call it a ‘sample sale’. We honestly didn’t know how things would go, but we knew one thing – we were going to build the most awesome booth Creation had ever seen. It took a team of four men with little construction skill, but we put together a pretty awesome booth (shout out to those of you who remember it!), and we showed up, and we sold. And we sold and we sold and we sold! People loved JesusBranded! It was awesome, we even had two customers fight for the same shirt...but in a sort of more Christian way “you take it”, “oh no you take it”, “no you”...haha.
So that’s where we were, we had a brand that we knew everybody loved... and now it was time to grow it.
Chapter 4: The Team That Dreamt To Be A Church...
(written by Sam)After I had returned from my trip to the Philippines, I immediately started a full-time job at a Seattle photography studio. Since I had parted ways with the other three co-founders of JesusBranded, I would only hear about their updates when I saw them in passing at church, or through other mutual friends that were excited about their success at Creation Fest. I was very happy that our project had done well, but because I've just entered the workforce through another unrelated company, I hadn't thought about it any more than that; after all, I now had the reality of student loans looming over me, so my thoughts were mainly focused on one thing: getting a steady paycheck. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, I had no clue JesusBranded was formulating it's own ideas about becoming more than just a one-time project...
It wasn't long into the fall season when I received an e-mail from Salil asking to meet back up and chat more about JesusBranded. I had been working for the photography studio for about 2 months by then, and during that short time I had already become disenchanted by the discrepancy between the job I was hired to do and the job I was actually doing. Needless to say, after revisiting the JesusBranded project, I felt yet another tug towards this dream, and my decision slowly but surely came about. By November of 2005, I had walked away from my full-time income and decided to take a monthly stipend with JesusBranded so that we can build atop what was laid down during that previous summer.
Our original team of 4 had grown with 3 new additions: James Hua (former CFO), Wing Yew Lum (former Marketing Director), and Quang Dinh (former Fashion Director), who all also surrendered their potential full-time employment to pursue this ideal. Being all tied together under the same church and similar college ministries, we began to not only work together but really share in fellowship with one another. Our daily morning team prayers turned into epic sessions of 2-hour prayer and worship, and our team's fire was used by God to bring other people into our office to simply hang out and pray with and over us. We were organically becoming a gathering of believers under one roof who would then go out and bring that fire to the places we went; and in breaking our proverbial walls down we lived the gospel organically, opening our doors to visitors like Banning Leibscher (Pastor, JesusCulture) and holding small acoustic concerts for local bands like New Heights while they were just getting started. We had become more than a t-shirt brand- we all agreed that we were becoming a church; and we passionately accepted the responsibility as we ran after the change we all wanted to be in our community.
God moved very mightily within and through JesusBranded, and we were grateful stewards for every minute of it. Our team of 7 had become family to one another, and our successes had us moving forward with reckless invincibility- after all, when God is on your side, nothing can stand against you; so we began taking on other projects in addition to JesusBranded, sure of ourselves that we were a world-class team that can conquer anything. Soon, we were to find out that us 7 kids had plenty of growing up to do...
CHAPTER 5: OVERSTRETCHED WINESKINS...
(written by Sam)JesusBranded felt right.
Our team felt more like family than anything, and the excitement of watching the brand grow was euphoric: We started supporting local ministries through merch, like New Heights (a great local band), King's Fools (also another amazing band), and GXP (an annual youth retreat); we toured several cities over the summer, meeting people from California to New York, and from Atlanta to Texas; and we began partnering with renowned names like Sanctus Real, Leeland, Voice Of The Martyrs, and Acquire The Fire in making their songs and vision come alive through design. We were getting a good taste of success, and naturally, we wanted more of it.
Having built established contacts within the manufacturing industry, we expanded out into the fashion world with several other projects. We created an umbrella company named Stripes39 (which is a story on its own, to be told later), under which we began our other endeavors: FannyPack (a fairly traded, organic handbag accessories line that donated back to victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy), Deconstruction Reconstruction (a recycled, fair traded vintage t-shirt line that donated back to Internation Justice Mission), Sling & Stones (an ultra premium, fairly traded organic denim line), and most notably of all, GoodSociety (a fairly traded, organic outfitter designed in partnership with Urban Outfitters). Our surge of growth saw us struggling to keep up, so we added more and more team members to our initial 7 through numerous internships as well as another key full-time addition of Tim Nguyen, our former web developer and programmer. We began firing on all cylinders, bent on proving excellence and growing into a company beyond our dreams.
Our relationships within the industry expanded- some of us started flying to the East Coast to meet with the buyers of Urban Outfitters, we had phone interviews with fashion PR guru Kelly Cutrone, several of us flew back and forth from Los Angeles, New York, India, and Berlin to meet with key people. Our stature seemed to be taking root because our other projects were opening the more enticing doors for us. Consequently, without us fully realizing it, JesusBranded began deteriorating as a community because we began turning our heads elsewhere.
And not long after, it wasn't just JesusBranded that began to suffer. Overloaded project loads meant clashing ideas, miscommunicated conversations, heightened insecurities, greater anxieties, and a slowly increasing marginalization of personalities. Our growth began to unravel the strength of the ties that bound us together, and inevitable consequences weren't far off from the horizon.
CHAPTER 6: The Fallout...
(written by Salil)Oddly enough, God had really worked to assemble an all-star team for JesusBranded. Without any real planning going into the assemblage, he somehow managed to ensure we had people with varying skill sets that all complimented each other well to form a complete business. In addition to me as CEO, Carl as the operations manager, and Sam as Creative Director our team was comprised of:
Wing Lum was a marketing guru with millions of dollars worth of business growth that could be attributed to the work he did even before graduating from college.
James Hua was a skillful expert at sales, finance, and process – really providing a backbone for the whole company.
Haley Ha was probably the top fine artist of her graduating class, and an allstar in the making who’s paintings fetched top dollar at auction.
Quang Dinh (who changed his name to Aiden for more ‘fashion appeal’) was a mechanical engineer with an eye for design – a killer combination of technical and creative skills.
Every one of us jumped into this endeavor at a young age, right after college actually – and slowly God revealed that he had different things in store for some of us, and as sad as I am to say it even to this day, the JB team was not able to stay together as people got called away / left one by one...
Wing was called away by God to go work elsewhere – we both knew there were other plans in store for him, though it was difficult as we were and are incredibly close as friends. He now is one of the highest profile search engine marketing managers in the world.
James disagreed with my leadership and, quite honestly, my leadership then was quite amateur and had more holes than substance. He left to go work at an amazing job in the real estate industry where he has seen tremendous success.
Haley’s visa expired and she had to go back to Korea where she found so much favor that she was even put on track to be an executive for a chain of museums.
Quang became consumed with the fashion industry, and quite honestly did not have any time left for JesusBranded. His work in the fashion industry has since landed him in countless magazines.
Keep in mind, this exodus took place over a period of time, so it was a gradual progression, but in the end all that remained was me, Sam, and Carl – and to be quite honest with all the other projects of Stripes stretching us in various directions JB really became a backburner project within Stripes39. As time progressed however, Stripes39 struggled and I realized it was time for a reorganization and I sat down with each person of the team and we discussed how they could best utilize their skills and passions. For Sam, he knew his passion was JesusBranded (though I didn’t want to see the brand die, I won’t lie by saying it was my top priority) and so we set out in the only direction that seemed logical at the time – to make JesusBranded into the most successful Christian t-shirt store ever.
CHAPTER 7: A Failed Resuscitation...
(written by Sam)Nobody really takes you as seriously once you tell them you own a Christian T-shirt brand.
Consequently, our team always had to work extra hard to catch up to those brands and companies that were already doing what we aimed to do in the t-shirt business; Threadless and BustedTees were examples of stores that did the volume we could only hope for, while brands like Ephraim and Shepherd were pursuing the same content and respect for design as us. With only 3 members left, we were grasping at straws, so we had added another friend of ours to our group: Tim Nguyen, a bonafide web developer and programmer who was a key part in JesusBranded's growing on-line presence. He had walked away from a fairly comfortable job at a very successful tech company in hopes to build JesusBranded's vision alongside us- and with his skillset added to our arsenal, we set out to make our way to the top.
JesusBranded.com took on several different identities for a couple of years, until we settled upon the hand-drawn, organic-sketchy look for a while. We had even added a blog that chronicled our summer adventures during the festival tours, which eventually grew to include some posts about our thoughts and reflection on our faith. As much growth as we thought we were inching towards, we weren't fully aware of how far away we were from what we really wanted to be. We had finally gotten a hang of production, of our design calendar, and even our web presence, but for some reason the brand still felt... stale. It wasn't too long when our lack of excitement began to drag the brand under, and what began as a glorious, daring alternative to the daily grind itself became the very thing we had strived to avoid.
The comatose state of JesusBranded lead to yet another crossroads for the team: Tim had been planning to propose to his girlfriend, and our plateauing progress compelled him to seek stability elsewhere with his near-future plans in mind. His departure was yet again another blow to JesusBranded's fragile state, and even though we had found other solutions to fill in the gap, there was no denying that the decline of our vision was alarmingly consistent. It seemed that all our attempts to jumpstart the brand would only result in our temporary excitement... which meant that eventually, something had to give.