By Caryn Altman
It was late one night when Chris Miller of Hampstead, Maryland, texted the word “apathy” to his two friends.
Only hours earlier, the three friends were sitting in their dorm room discussing names for a clothing line that on a whim they had decided to start.
“Right after we met, Chris showed me some designs with the Towson logo that he made,” said Miller, referring to Chris Miller of Middletown, Maryland (no relations). “When he showed me the design, I thought that it was pretty cool and told him that I would be able to put it on a shirt.”
Although the two were very interested in making shirts and subsequently starting their own clothing line, they went about their idea with caution.
“We started off making Towson shirts at the beginning of the year just as a test run to see if we would gain interest of the students here,” said Miller of Middletown. “We were able to cover our supply costs pretty quickly, and we decided that venturing into clothing and starting our own brand would be a wise decision.”
Miller of Middletown’s roommate, Kenny Smith, was also interested in the project and agreed to make the website for them.
“I was there for their first shirt endeavor as well as when they started talking about creating their own brand,” Smith said. “I said to them, ‘I’m really interested in making websites, so I can help you out,’ and that’s how I got roped into this.”
The trio – all information technology majors at Towson – tossed around names for their brand for quite some time, but after Miller of Hampstead was persistent with the name “apathy,” it started to stick.
“We were sitting around brainstorming late one night and apathy happened to be one of the words that we wrote down,” Miller said. “Apathy means not caring and that is something that really fell in line with our mission. I was going to sleep that night and I thought ‘I like that word.’ It is awesome and describes a lot of people, myself included. I texted in the group chat at 2 a.m. and was like, ‘We have to do apathy. It sounds awesome.It’s catchy.It has a cool meaning behind it.’”
They were creating attire that is also known as street wear. Street wear, which is geared towards the skater crowd, mocks clothing that would oftentimes be considered high end. Their goal is to create clothing for the people that don’t fit into any specific style. A lot of Apathy’s influence for their clothing comes from art work from the 1900s.
“Street wear is classified as a lifestyle brand,” Miller of Middletown said. “It’s basically the people that are opposed to colored shorts and pretty clothes. We want to reach out to the people in the plain white T-shirts that aren’t like everyone else. So we’re just trying to cater to that kind of audience. So much of college, at least here, is people that dress like the generic [fraternity boy] look and then there is the other 50 percent that just doesn’t fit into a style or their style isn’t classified as something.”
The Apathy clothes are at the moment all being made out of their dorm room. At first, they sent their shirts to a company to have them created, but after a lot of difficulties, the team made the decision to make the shirts themselves.
“We started off screen printing them with this little iron that I brought to school with me,” Smith said. “When things started to take off we realized that we needed to get something more substantial if we were really going to turn this into something. After some time we were able to buy a heat press in order to produce our product faster.”
Since starting Apathy in December, Miller, Smith and Miller say that their products continue to sell due to support from their friends as well as the online community.
“We needed to find a way to market it and we had this idea of hitting mid-sized Youtube people,” Miller of Hampstead said. “We knew a couple of people that had smaller to medium fan bases and we asked them if they would be willing to showcase our shirts on their vlogs if we sent them to them. Luckily, they were all for it and as soon as they posted their videos with our merchandise on them, our sales started to skyrocket.”
As their company continues to grow, the three hope that they will be able to stay true to their mission, which is to create affordable, high quality street wear. Although they currently are only focusing on spreading the word about their clothing in Baltimore, they are excited to see where this clothing line will take them.
“Our majors are almost like the opposite of this endeavor that we’re talking, being in the computer industry,” Miller of Middletown said. “It would be cool to be able to do both of them at the same time. I wouldn’t drop out of college unless this absolutely took off, but it’s nice to know that I have something I can make money off of and that another thing where all of my passion is going. For now, we’re just going to take it as it comes and go from there.”