There’s no shortage of upstart clothing brands in 2025, and it’s easy to understand why – all-in-one fulfillment services make it so that a brand owner never actually has to touch their own merchandise, services now exist for everything from custom tags to custom buttons, and social media makes it easier than ever to build a following around a few lookbook photos.

So, what if you decided to skip all that and do things the hard way? Send merchandise yourself, have your neighbor sew tags into your garments, and work directly with your local skate shop to grow the brand?

Today we’re talking to Dane Nomellini, Griffin Gass, and Andrew Nedimyer of Pearl, a new clothing brand from Seattle that’s doing just that. They’re doing things the hard way, which, for them, seems to be working out pretty great.

Village Psychic

I wanted to start things off talking about the mindsets you guys have that brought you together.

Dane Nomellini

We all have our unique perspectives, but I think we also have a shared idea of what we want to see out in the world. We're constantly looking at different stuff and shooting ideas around, it’s not solely my taste in the whole thing. It’s a shared effort.

Village Psychic

What brings you guys together in terms of the ideas that you have?

Griffin Gass

I feel like for me what kind of connected the whole thing was skating, hanging around with Dane all the time and both caring for clothing. I'd buy something and think “This is rad”, but then I’m blacking out a logo on it or cutting something off. I’d find so much that’s close to what I wanted but wasn't exactly what I felt I wanted to wear. So we came together with this idea that we could make sure that the clothes we actually want to wear exist.

Andrew Nedimyer

Dane and Griffin got me involved after they had already talked about their ideas.

Dane and I had talked about it a bit even before then, he’d had some ideas for a brand, but they really brought me in when they were like “We're ready to do this.” I had previously done some similar things – helping brands set up their websites and the business end of things. I felt like once we all kind of got in it together, it started to have more momentum and take off a little bit more.

Village Psychic

What’s the breakdown between what you guys do?

Andrew

Dane typically comes with sketchbooks or just a bunch of ideas, and together we’ll all narrow it down. He'll come with a plethora of graphics and we’ll start to see which ideas fit together – being like “this one sort of feels like it sits next to this one, this piece goes here.”

Once we're looking over everything, it'll be like, “Okay, like this kind of feels like it's turning into a collection that we can base around an idea.” From there Dane refines the graphics.

We're purposefully keeping the collections pretty small, just so it's more manageable because we're so new and it's literally just the three of us.

That idea of keeping things small extends into stuff like how much inventory we stock, how many skate shops we're selling to, keeping in mind that we're folding everything ourselves, tagging everything, shipping everything, to making sure we have our hands on all the things that go out the door and that we keep that personal touch on it.

Village Psychic

So you guys are still packing orders yourselves, shipping everything yourselves?.

Andrew

Yeah. Every time it fills up, it's like, it's us sitting right here, tagging the stuff, putting it in bags. It's all from us.

Village Psychic

Even a few years ago people could see this all as a real drawback, but now that everything comes prepackaged, from fulfillment already in plastic wrap…

Andrew

Yeah, and I definitely see the reason why people use fulfillment services, because you get to pass off a big chunk of the work. When our first collection was released, we did these little envelopes with cards in them and they were all wax sealed with a little Pearl logo on the stamp. We wanted to do stuff like that for every single order to give a reminder what you miss out on with all that dropship or fulfillment stuff. It’s allowed us to be a little bit more intentional.

Another benefit of being this size is having all the inventory here, we get all the samples of the product first. For all the blanks we use, we've gone through a bunch of different tests and wanted to get really high quality stuff.

For sewing, we use our friend Karl Toglu who lives a couple streets away. He sews all the labels on our garments. The print shop we use is nearby too. We can go there and chat with the people printing stuff. 35th North, the skate shop, is just down the street too. We're seeing it in the shop that it's carried, right down the road. Dane and Griffin even screen printed some of our hang tags – at one point were poking holes in the tags, putting on them on all the shirts. It's like literally we're touching every single garment that goes out the door, which is pretty cool.

Village Psychic

What brands do you look up to?

Griffin

It's hard, because I don't necessarily want to shout out any one brand and be like “This is what we're pulling inspiration from.” I feel like it comes down more to individual garments that I'll randomly see, where some brand made a shirt that just feels really good and I like the fit, but maybe I don't like what's on it. I might like this cutty little tag that has a random color of stitching on it, and see that as a rad thing that we can pull from as inspiration. For me personally, I don't think there's like one or any brand that I could be like. “Yeah, that's what I want this to be.”

Andrew

I will say that JJJJound, out of Montreal, I’ve been following that brand since like 2011. I feel like that guy just has a lot of restraint with what he does, it’s not necessarily what we want to do, but I see that he’s really found his lane.

But yeah, I agree with what Griffin's saying, it's like we’re trying not to bite anyone as much as just asking “How can we kind of make something that feels like us?”

Village Psychic

Do you guys go try to pick stuff out of the thrift stores?

Dane

No, I'll like look on my Depop and all that, but I'm not at this thrift stores like digging through bins and stuff. I don't have the patience for it. I'll think I want to do it. I'll like go out, walk into the store and I'm like, “I’m not going to fucking dig through this rack.”

Village Psychic

Tell me about two years from now; what do you guys want Pearl to turn into?

Andrew

I think we've had nice, steady, manageable growth as far as us getting into more and more shops that we want to be associated with, and we're being pretty intentional about that too. That comes back to the intention we have to not just open the brand up to every single shop. We don't even have enough inventory to keep up with that. We’re hitting up the shops that we actually want to be in, using our connections that way, and growing into more shops we want to be in. We’ll eventually make some cut and sew stuff and get into some international shops.

Village Psychic

Will we see some pants?

Dane

Yeah. Some pants, some jackets. I did just want to say, at this point the shops that carry our stuff are people that we know. It's been kind of like an easy entry point to get into skate shops. From that place, because Pearl is carried at some really good shops, it's helping us grow.

Village Psychic

Have you guys looked at international at all? Looking at Japan, Korea, any of those?

Andrew

Yeah, a little bit. I've helped other brands do that, growing internationally and getting distribution.

I feel like we've been getting hit up quite a bit on our website. At first we didn't offer international shipping and now we do, but it's still kind of a lot to ship like a shirt to Spain or somewhere like that . So I think trying to figure that out will be next.

It feels like it's just inevitable growth over time. It's been a slow burn, but as well very steady and just continuing at the trajectory that we're going. It's like you're growing a plant. You keep watering it and taking care of it, and it'll grow.

Village Psychic

How does skating fit in? Are you guys going to do a video? Are you guys going to have a team?

Griffin

We definitely hook people up, It's mostly friends right now. We know each other through skateboarding. We're all skateboarders, we can't ignore that, but I don't feel like we would stand up and say it's a skateboarding brand.

Dane

There's also a lot of different types of people we want to hook up to. We do these like artist interviews on our website and stuff like that, we're trying to kind of tap into skate adjacent stuff, like people that we know from skating, but tap into more of the network of artists within skating. But it's, it's all friends. It's not random.

Dane

We're super good friends with the local shop 35th North, and when it comes down to the type of people that are buying our stuff there, like it's more people coming in that don't know anything about the brand. They're just seeing it and buying it. So it's like that kind of tells us that

it could live in other types of stores as well.

Andrew

Another interesting thing we’ve learned for our online sales is that about half of our orders come from women.

Village Psychic

Do you have any insights on if they're buying it for their significant others or if they’re buying it to rock themselves?

Andrew

Probably a mix of both, but I think it just sort of appeals to everyone – it's not really like a masculine brand or anything. The name is super feminine, and maybe that has something to do with it. feel like our graphics are never that edgy, it's all pretty welcoming and safe, and a lot of the graphic references are to super classic stuff. So I, think that it makes what we do open to any type of person. And that’s what we want.

Village Psychic

Are you guys limited to being in just skate shops or could you see Pearl existing in some more like boutique, like multi-brand type stores?

Griffin

I would say there's no limitations.

Andrew

That's a good question, because I feel like in the beginning we weren't really sure, it was like, “should we lean more into skate or, like, try to just fit into wherever?” Because, like, naturally we just know more people skate shops, we went that route. But I think it could totally be in other shops.

Pearl Is Doing Things The Hard Way, and it’s Great