A Christian apparel brand Umbrella owns, funds and carries the risk on. It is not a client. In build, planned for Q1 2027.
The first collection, Called by Name. Cut and weight chosen before the graphic.
Christian apparel is a large global category and most of it fails in one of two directions. Either it whispers, a small symbol on a pocket, faith as a hint you could deny in the wrong room. Or it shouts without craft, a verse in a default font on a blank shirt, as though conviction excused the design.
Both make the same mistake. They treat the belief as a graphic to be applied to a product, rather than as the thing the product is built out of.
Merch builds print-on-demand brands for clients and for Umbrella itself. This one is Umbrella’s own, so there was no client to approve it and nobody else to carry the loss. The standard was not whether it would pass. It was whether we would wear it.
Start from the verse, and from one detail inside it.
A tear from below is a break-in, something forced by the people outside. A tear from the top is an opening made from the other side. The barrier did not come down because anyone climbed it. It came down because it was opened.
That direction is the whole brand. It sets the posture: nothing here is earned by the wearer, and nothing here is timid. So the identity could not hedge, because the claim it carries does not hedge.
The line is express your faith boldly and authentically. Design has to earn the word boldly, or the line is only marketing.
A mark that is also a letter. A two-bar cross, drawn tight enough to survive as a small chest embroidery, doubling as the t in the lockup. The mark and the name are one object.
A wordmark in blackletter. The type of the first printed Bibles, still carrying five centuries of weight. Used straight, never ironically.
Three type voices, each with a job. Blackletter for what is being claimed. Bold sans capitals for everything functional. A brush script for the one phrase that should look written by a hand.
Black, bone and red. No fourth colour. Red appears once per surface and it means what red has always meant here.
Photography as devotional imagery. High-contrast black and white. Carved stone, thorns, hands reaching. Nothing smiling, nothing lifestyle.
A layout system that reads like a record, not an advert. Metadata in the corners, red square markers, the scripture reference always present. Every surface is stamped and dated.
Product, not print-on-a-blank. The first collection, Called by Name, designed front and back, on oversized tees and hoodies chosen for how they hang.
The objects the brand arrives in. Box, bag, cards, posters. A brand that asks for commitment cannot turn up in a poly mailer with nothing on it.
Advising on brand and running a brand are different jobs, and only one of them tells you whether the advice was any good. Merch exists so that Umbrella is exposed to its own recommendations. If the positioning is weak here, we do not lose a client. We lose our own money.
There are no sales figures on this page because there have been no sales yet. When there are, they will appear here, including if they are bad. That is the point of running the system on our own money rather than only on somebody else’s.
The curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.
Matthew 27:51
Tell us where the business is today, what is getting in the way, and what needs to happen next.