Hi, if you've stumbled upon this blog, my name is Will King, founder of men's shaving brand, King of Shaves (www.shave.com) and more recently through my ideas development partnership, Flop Flip the two internet sites www.jodo.biz and www.twomo.com
But this blog is about a little passion I have for branded clothing design...two brands in fact, one called White Smith 'Made with Irony', the other being 'King Of'.
Fashioning Knowledge. A couple of weeks ago, when searching for knowledge on crowdsourcing to do with www.jodo.biz, I came across a website called www.SpreadShirt.net. Amazingly, it allows you to create A) your own store, B) your own designs and C) gives you all the wherewithal and infrastructure to get selling your own designs! It was founded by several German guys in 1999. Anyhow, enough about the shop, what about the brand (sorry range of tees and sweatshirt products with lofty brand aspirations ;-)
White Smith. Made with Irony.
Over New Year 2005, I was holidaying in Val d'Isere. At a party, I met a ski instructor chap with the surname of Smith and we came to chat about fashion brands that had started in Val, Fat Face being the most well known, founded in 1988 by a couple of ski bums taking the fashion piste (and recently sold for £100m). I thought it would be interesting to prefix his surname with White (rather than the obvious Black) and thus WHITESMITH was born. I also found this brand name somewhat ironic - English men are commonly called Smith and they are (being English) normally white. They are typically not Black Smiths!
Anyhow, I returned to the UK, registered the trademark WHITESMITH in Class 3 (I had earlier registered the trademark KING OF but more of that later as I said) and also created the slogan 'Made with Irony' (not iron, geddit?). Finally, I managed to buy the domain name www.whitesmith.co.uk from, amazingly enough, the village of WhiteSmith in the UK through an intermediary!
And, in the evening of Saturday 23rd December whilst my seven year old son was sleeping, and my parents and brothers family were watching TV I designed the first WHITESMITH 'Made with Irony' tee shirts, sweats, a hoodie and beanie. You'll find them temporarily at https://www.spreadshirt.net/shop.php?sid=200389 until I get www.WhiteSmith.co.uk up and running.
Cool huh! Ice cool (well, in my imagination...!) Anyhow, do visit, I hope you like, and maybe one day, when the designs have evolved and the business grown, you can say you read it here first. WHITESMITH. Made with Irony in Germany for an Englishman and found through 'The Wisdom of Crowds...'
