THE STORY BEHIND THE COLLECTION: SELLING STATE

You may have already heard this story, but we wanted to put it into a blog post so that everyone has a chance to read it, and so that it has a permanent space on the website.

The story goes something like this…

Our founder & CEO Kristin Westfahl was binge watching Netflix’s Selling Sunset one day. Clearly a slow day for work as she too is a licensed real estate agent. She’s watching the show and thinks “Selling Sunset would be so cute on a t-shirt, I would wear that.” Her husband quickly informed her that putting “Selling Sunset” on a t-shirt would likely be copyright infringement as they’ve already named the tv show that. 

She continued to daydream and within a minute or two she realized that she could put “Selling Oklahoma” on a shirt. That would be even cuter because it’s personal to her and not some tv show. She shared it with her husband and she could see the wheels turning behind his eyes. He loved it. 

The more they pondered it together, they thought this could be a cute t-shirt design for every state! 

The first step after coming up with an idea is to go to Google and see if you can find it. Has someone already done it? Has someone done something similar to it? Kristin was shocked to say no. In her research, and she researched it thoroughly as she could not believe her eyes, she did not see anything - nothing at all - that used the phrase “Selling Oklahoma” or any state for that matter. She googled similar words, phrases, everything that she could think of and nothing. Not even close. This is the part where Kristin felt God was speaking to me. 

If you’ve ever heard of Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, share how her business started - this reminded Kristin of her story. Now this is Kristin's recollection of her being interviewed on Tony Robbins’ podcast so please note that she is paraphrasing from memory here and it is not an exact quote. This will get you the gist of the story though.

So Sara Blakely tells the story of how when she launched her business, Spanx, she had so many women come to her and say “I was doing this too! I was cutting my panty hose off to make something similar and why didn’t I come up with that as a business!?” Sara responds with something to the nature of ‘the only thing I can think of why I was the one to take this idea, that apparently several women had, and turn it into a business is that I was looking for it. I was asking for a sign, for something’ and that part of Sara's story always stuck with Kristin. It stuck with her because after hearing that, she began asking for the same thing. At this moment, where she realized that she had come up with a design that no one else had done yet, Kristin felt like this was God’s way of saying “this is the direction you’re supposed to go. This idea, this design is what I want you to pursue. Embrace it and go with it.”  

So she did. 

Over the course of several months, playing around with fonts and different styles and such, she finally found a design that clicked. The simple and modern font for “Selling” paired with a more hand-written, scripted font for the state’s name. Together they sang - it was such a beautiful coupling that it looked as if it was always meant to be.

Although the wording was inspired by a hit tv show, Kristin knew that putting the state’s outlines on it would complete the look. She thought of shirts like The Home T that were so loved. There is something about the visual aspect of the state outline, it gives it that little something extra to have a sense of pride about on a t-shirt, product or artwork, for whatever reason.

From there she decided to take it to the next step. She enlisted the help of her brother-in-law, a graphic designer, for some help finalizing the design in Adobe Photoshop to make it clean and professional. If you know Kristin you know she has a high attention to detail and refuses to accept anything less than the best. The shirt design was no exception. 

The design was complete. 

Kristin had every intention for this original t-shirt to be a side hustle, but God quickly told her that He had big plans for this, so she listened. She started a business and named it This Little Brand.

We are so glad you are here. Thank you for reading our story and supporting the brand.

SIGNED,