About

It started, the way most good things do, with too much time and not enough sense.

A folding table on the sand at Venice Beach. A card table at a Toronto farmers market with a hand-lettered sign and a cash box. Two cities, one crew, a stack of shirts that kept growing because nobody could bring themselves to stop making them.

The Venice Press wasn't built in a boardroom. It was built between cities — in the back of vans, on the floors of apartments, in the margins of sketchbooks that got sun-damaged and salt-warped before anyone thought to archive them. The designs came from wandering: from flea market finds and old paperbacks, from road signs in the desert and murals on side streets, from the kind of things you notice when you're not in a hurry to be anywhere.

That's always been the thing about this crew. Nobody was in a hurry.

We sold shirts to strangers who became regulars. We set up at pop-ups where half the people just wandered in from the street. We dragged tables across both sides of the border — the farmers markets of Toronto where the light goes golden in October, the open air of Venice Beach where it's always kind of golden. We learned what people held onto. The soft ones. The faded ones. The ones they wore until a better version of themselves emerged from underneath.

That's the secret of a good shirt, maybe. It takes time. It takes washing. It improves in the telling.

We've got hundreds of designs now — a collection that grew the way a record crate grows, one find at a time. Each one started as an idea somebody couldn't shake. A sketch. An obsession. A thing that needed to exist.

This is the Venice Press. A small crew, two cities, and more shirts than we can count.

We hope you find the one that's yours.