With an iPad in hand, Caleb Seong (9) sat down at a table at a cafe with Erin Baek and started to create a design for his new clothing brand, Virtue. Although he wasn’t sure what he would design on their shirts yet, they were excited to explore the options before looking for models and add the finishing touches to the brand.
“We came up with the idea Virtue because it summarizes all of the fruit of the spirits and that shows what it’s like following the word of God and being able to live by that and having no complaints about whatever you are doing,” Seong said.
Seong and Baek created Virtue to help out with a missionary event happening during the summer by GI (God’s Image).
“GI is like a Christian dance organization and we’re selling these T-shirts so we can raise money to fund our mission trip to Korea,” Seong said. “We can worship God in Korea and show people what it means to be truly Christian.”
Despite this clothing brand being a huge hit among many people, Seong had difficulties coming up with this design and name. A few of his friends, Ava Fig (9) and Joann Park (9) saw him overcome this obstacle and create an amazing design.
“At first he was confused about the design and unsure of what to put,” Fig said. “He wasn’t sure on how he could express his message, but he overcame this struggle and eventually figured out how to effectively display this message.”
While sitting at the cafe trying to think of a design with Baek, and after constant trial and error, they both saw a painting on the wall of the cafe. Both of them loved the painting and decided to create their t-shirts design based off of the painting. With many obstacles in the way, they were still able to come up with an amazing design to really portray what message they wanted to tell others. Park thought that seeing her friend start a clothing brand from scratch was such a cool experience to see.
“Seeing two students who started freshly off from nothing and they just made what they thought was good and I think that that’s really rare nowadays and that makes it so much more unique,” Park said. “I’ve never seen one of my friends start a business or do something even close to this so it was really exciting to see the transition of the idea become an actual clothing business.”
Seong is waiting for more orders to be put in and is starting to hand out the clothes to everyone in March.
“During this season, the theme of living out the fruits of the spirit and supplementing our faith with self-control and moral excellence has been very important,” Seong said. “Recognizing that because we serve as the image of God and his kingdom, this theme is very big.”
