A while ago, I gave myself a simple experiment: wear a different Wake Up, Be Kind, Sleep, Repeat T-shirt every day for a week and pay attention to what happened.
The idea came from something I’ve always believed about We Are Kind. Clothing can carry a message beyond the person wearing it. We walk through coffee shops, grocery stores, airports, sidewalks and parks surrounded by people we’ll probably never meet. Most will pass us without saying a word. But they might still read what’s written across our chest.
For the first few days of my little experiment, nothing particularly interesting happened. Then, while I was sitting at a café, an older gentleman approached me. He had noticed the shirt.
He told me how cool he thought the message was. He said it reflected the way he liked to live and that it was good to see someone promoting that idea.
That was it. A short conversation between two strangers. But I remember how happy it made me.
Here was something that had begun as an idea in my head, eventually became a design, was printed onto a piece of fabric, and somehow found its way into someone else’s day. The shirt had created a connection that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
That encounter changed the way I thought about what we make at WAK.
We sometimes imagine changing the world through enormous actions like starting movements, donating millions, reaching thousands of people or creating something that becomes globally recognized. Those things can certainly create impact. But most of us experience the world on a much smaller scale. We experience it through the people standing beside us in line. The person sitting at the next table. The stranger walking toward us on the sidewalk.
A message as simple as Wake Up, Be Kind may be read hundreds of times during the life of one T-shirt. Most people will never mention it. Someone might smile. Someone might think about it for a second. Someone might carry those words into their next interaction. And every once in a while, someone will stop and talk to you.
That is one of the reasons I still love creating clothing with simple messages. A T-shirt isn’t going to solve the world’s problems, but it can put an idea into the world and allow that idea to travel wherever we go.
Maybe someone reads it exactly when they need the reminder. Maybe it starts a conversation between two strangers in a café. And maybe changing the world sometimes looks exactly like that: one person, one interaction, one kind T-shirt at a time.
