By Carroll R. Walton, carroll@insidetailgating.com
Chris White, CEO of Shinesty.com, has made a name for himself creating outrageous event and party clothes. This fall he has expanded into collegiate apparel with a brand dubbed Tellum + Chop. That means tailgaters across the country are about to up their game.
We’re not talking about school logos slapped on T-shirts and hats. This new line outfits fans in bright Tennessee orange overalls with checkerboard print, Oklahoma State Hawaiian shirts with graphic “Pistol Petes” all over them, and Crimsoncolored sport coat and pant suits dotted in Alabama script “As.” This is fun, high quality clothing made with the traditions of each school in mind. And they are show-stoppers.
“This is a huge statement piece at a game,” White said. “It’s literally built for tailgating. It’s why we did it.”
White caught up with Inside Tailgating just before the launch of Tellum + Chop. With personality as colorful as the clothing he creates, White detailed how his personal quest for great party wear as a college student laid the groundwork for building a successful apparel business. They are based in Boulder, Colo.
Q. Is it inappropriate to ask what you’re wearing?
(Laughs) Today I’m wearing a pretty pedestrian pair of normal gray pants and just a normal shirt because I’m in Jackson Hole for a friend’s wedding. But normally you’d catch me in some sort of strange pair of overalls, a kimono perhaps. My underwear is always Shinesty. I never stray from that, so I always have some sort of animal in an inappropriate place.
Q. From what I understand, the idea to make outlandish party clothes dates back to your time at DePauw (Ind.) University and your own search for what to wear to a party?
A. That’s the original impetus for the brand. What was say is we exist to force the world to take itself less seriously. That’s our driving cultural value that we use internally. It informs everything we do, from marketing, even writing copy, taking pictures for the website. We try to do it in a way, even if you’re not in the market for that specific product, it still gives you something and that thing it’s giving to you is humor. So as long as you’re someone who doesn’t take everything super seriously, you’ll laugh.
Q. Give me an ensemble you wore to a college party that knocked everybody’s socks off?
A. One time we decided to dress up as the two figure skaters from that Will Ferrell movie “Blades of Glory.” We were able to find male dance costumes and then bedazzle them so they looked like skater suits, and we wore roller blades around. We went full in.
Q. Was that a Halloween party or something?
A. That was just a normal Tuesday.
Q. Did you recognize a void in the market when you were shopping for clothes?
When you’re in college, you have time to go to thrift shops and estate sales. You have time to scour the surrounding area for a unique and fun outfit. What we realized when we moved to Denver and started working: you have a job and you have money for first time in your life, but you don’t have time. With that in mind (we thought) “Why is there not a curated awesome brand for this type of product?” That was the initial jumping off point for the brand.
Q. I read that you put yourself through college. How did you do it?
Selling basically anything I could sell. I sold Cutko knives. I sold vacation packages, and I sold T-shirts that I designed, a lot of them. I would design T-shirts for fraternities and sororities and church groups or sports teams. What I found early on was If I took what they wanted me to design and I injected some sort of irreverent humor into it, I would sell a lot more, so I got good at that voice and creating those jokes that were sarcastic or sometimes inappropriate, sometimes silly. That’s what helped us form and craft the original voice. It was an inspiration for the way the voice talks to customers.
Q. What’s one of your favorite T-shirt creations?
That we can say publicly? There were so many inappropriate ones. There was an Army shirt I made one time that was making a joke about privates. It was a picture of two cartoon army men and it said “Taking our privates into battle.” You get the double meaning there.
Q. I’ll never forget a T-shirt my friend’s fraternity put out that was a play on the Latin phrase: “We came. We saw. We came again.”
Yes, I did that joke as well. We had one that was for a fraternity, it was the famous picture of Marilyn Monroe screaming. It said “the louder you scream, the louder we come to the rescue.” The “to the rescue” part was in smaller font.
Q. So are some of your college buddies now working with you in Colorado?
There are five people who work for us now who are friends from DePauw, including my little brother. Three other guys I was friends with in school were some of my first employees and are still with the company.
Q. When did Shinesty really take off?
The end of 2014. We’ve been growing fast. I’d say the fastest we’ve been growing is now. We have about 40 employees, which is about double from last year. This brand, the Tellum + Chop brand, is definitely a little bit different from Shinesty. It’s a fun brand for the college lifestyle (but) when it comes to collegiate licensing, you have to be a little more appropriate. We separated the two brands so we could keep Shinesty the way it is, which is that irreverent, sometimes R-rated humor, and then be able to dive deep into the collegiate market and still make really fun clothes. Obviously they’re still loud and pretty outlandish and very unique. Most sports license apparel is hats and T-shirts and basic things and we’re producing overalls and kimonos and suits, loud product, but we give people the ability to still rep their team in a fun way.
Q. How many schools are you incorporating so far?
We’re launching with about 30 schools. We should have about 60 that will launch by the end of the year. It’s everything from Oklahoma State, Oklahoma, to Michigan. We’ve got schools in the SEC—Tennessee, Alabama, Auburn—to a couple in the northeast. We’ve even added some small schools like DePauw and Indiana State that we had relationships with. We put in for as many as we could. It’s a process to go through the licensing system, it takes a little bit of time, so as we keep growing, we’ll keep adding schools to hopefully have as many as we possibly can.
Q. When you started Shinesty did you always envision adding college sports?
Yeah. The overarching vibe of the whole company—creating a brand around life’s social moments—to us is anything from really obvious stuff like Christmas and Fourth of July to less obvious stuff like music festivals and sporting events. We always knew that we wanted to move that way, and we’ve done some other sublicensing deals with NFL products. It just took a little bit of time to go through the licensing process and to have the infrastructure in place for us operationally, to be able to execute. When you get to sports it’s hard because there’s a lot of different teams, so you have to make a lot of different prints. Unlike Christmas where you make four or five prints, and you apply to everyone who celebrates Christmas, this gets very complex very fast.
Q. Do you guys design and produce the clothes yourselves?
We do everything in house. We have our own full design and art team. We try to design into the local market thinking about what is some insider knowledge that only a real fan would know and try to incorporate that into some of the designs. When you look at a lot of sports merchandise out there, it is designed in a pretty lazy way, which is like “Hey we’re going to slap on a logo” and that’s it. We try to take a much more wholistic approach No. 1 because we think it’s better for the customer, and No. 2 just because it’s more interesting and fun for us to design.
Q. What are a couple of examples?
For Arizona, we took a hand-painted mountain desert scene and tacked that into the back of the Arizona print, which looks like that vibe that you get when you’re in Arizona vs. just taking the same Hawaiian print and pasting a logo in. We did another really cool one for Oklahoma State where we took hand-drawn western motifs. We did have to remove the six-shooter, which is cool, but we drew a “Wanted” poster of Pistol Pete, and we injected some tumbleweed-looking drawings and put that together.
Q. So do you tailgate much?
Oh yeah. We’re in Boulder, so we tailgate for all of CU’s (the University of Colorado) football games. There was a time there where it was pretty hard to watch, but we’ve gotten much better. We tailgate and it’s a blast. CU sets up a nice grassy area; it’s an old practice field that’s next to the stadium, and they set that up with tents. It’s a very scaled back version of The Grove (at Ole Miss) and it’s a blast. It’s a beautiful place to watch a football game. We tailgate quite a bit.
Q. Do all the Shinesty employees come in full garb?
Oh yeah. You can’t not, right? We have to. Because we all have access to the product, we’re like “How do we one-up each other?” You have to add in some vintage finds to complete the look. We can’t all be wearing the same product. People have made customizations so they can stand out among the Shinesty employees.
Q. What’s the best one you’ve seen lately?
Probably got to be some overalls. We make an American flag overall product. We have a big party, a fundraiser for a cancer charity, that’s Americana-themed called Hog Fest. We have above-ground pools and bands play and a big hog roast. And one of our marketing guys took his overalls—it was a hot day—he cut out the crotch area of the overalls and replaced it with mesh, so that it would breathe and so that he could swim in them. It was pretty funny. I was like, “That’s pretty good, man.”
Q. You guys have some celebrity clients right?
We do, yeah. Joe Maddon, the manager of the Chicago Cubs is a big Shinesty customer and fan, and we’re a fan of him obviously after that. In 2016 when the Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 100 years, that was the first year Joe Maddon found Shinesty, and they wore Shinesty on multiple trips. He does it to keep it loose in the middle of a long season. During the World Series, they were down three games to one and Halloween was one of the off days in between games. We sent them all a bunch of Halloween costumes and suits and they wore them on the plane on the way to Cleveland going in for Game 5 and people were criticizing, “He’s down 3-1, not taking anything seriously.” The rest is history, down 3-1, they won the series, broke the curse and all that. We were like “Oh, Cubs wore Shinesty. Cubs won the World Series, coincidence? I don’t know!”
Q. Broncos kicker Brandon McManus is another big client, right?
Yeah we’ve worked with the Broncos for a long time. McManus (pictured above) is one of our friends. He always gives all the Broncos players some sort of Shinesty item for Christmas every year. He calls himself McManuclaus, and he brings them 100 boxes of Shinesty gear for Christmas.
Q. That’s awesome. Now that you’re venturing into college gear too, is the goal to turn on an Alabama football game and see crowd shots of fans wearing your overalls?
Exactly. We’ve seen it from some stuff we did for the NFL. We collaborate with a brand called Little Earth, who has an NFL license. We’ll do some exclusive designs, and they manufacture and license for us. They’re now exclusive to Tellum + Chop. I went to the Super Bowl last year with them as a guest and got to see tons of our Patriots suits all over the place which was awesome.
Check out Tellum + Chop at www.tellumandchop.com.
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