[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
Images: courtesy James Eldridge”][/title]
This story starts in the basement of a house owned by Mr. and Mrs. Eldridge in the Big Sky Country of Montana. On that fine October day in 2013, the long-married couple was upstairs. Their sons, James and Rick, were down below, brainstorming, rather freely, in a what-would-you-do-if-you-knew-you-couldn’t-fail kind of way. James had recently sold his share of James+James, a Northwest Arkansas furniture company started in a garage that now has more than twenty employees. He’d taken a two-week sabbatical, traveled to his parents’ home, and was reflecting on where his life had taken him. He was also looking for his next big thing, because there’s always something on the horizon if you’re as innovative as James. The brothers’ talk soon turned to books. And that led to a deeper conversation about classic literature.
James was certain that reading was significantly undervalued, even though he saw it as fundamental as food and air. Was there a way, he wondered, to transfer this thing they both loved into something lucrative that was lovely and sincere, while keeping it from becoming an “exclusive nerd thing.”
His brother Rick certainly thought they could. At twenty-four, he is an accomplished illustrator. “His work is beautiful,” James says, “and I wanted the world to see it.”
What better way to showcase beautiful designs than to put them on T-shirts? The brothers lit up at the idea. T-shirts with quotes from the great old books, including poetry, and illustrations to make them irresistible. There in the basement, with ideas flowing like a river, they decided on a name: WearLit. Simple, direct, easy to remember.
They bounded up the steps to find their parents. “It felt like we were kids again,” James says. Their father, who has an MBA, was known for his ability to shoot down any idea that couldn’t hold water. But when they told him, he smiled, a great bright smile of approval, and the brothers felt victorious.
The next step was setting parameters. There were already T-shirt companies using humorous quotes, or really dark ones. They decided to use neither. What they were looking for were profound and memorable passages that most of us have read, many from school reading lists.
One of their first designs after they opened their online store in March, 2014 was a quote by Louisa May Alcott, “I’ve got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.” The design is a castle on the top that morphs into a key on the bottom.
“That was seen by the Louisa May Alcott Museum in Concord, Massachusetts,” James says. “I got a call from the curator saying, ‘I want to buy fifty shirts to put in our store because we love your work.’ That’s the strongest compliment a designer can get. The museum is the Orchard House, where Alcott wrote. The tour guides even wear our shirts.”
The sell was a perfect fit. They’d learned along the way that people don’t buy literature clothing unless they have an emotional tie to the book and the author. Those at the museum certainly felt that pull. The T-shirts were also extremely soft, by design, so that a WearLit shirt is likely to become your favorite shirt. And while the Alcott Museum responded quickly to the new company, so did many others. The day they launched their website, they had 6,000 unique visitors, and their sales soared.
One of the best things about creating a product is seeing someone you don’t know who’s purchased it. That happened to James when he was in Benson, Nebraska, just outside Omaha. There was a girl in a coffee shop with a WearLit shirt.
There may come a time when such a sighting won’t affect James. But he doesn’t think so. He is awed by the response WearLit has gotten, and he doubts the company would ever have evolved if he hadn’t had the upbringing he had. He was one of six children, raised in Hawaii with loving parents who adored reading. Talking to him, hearing him recite lines from great literature, hearing him discuss complex theories about art and life, it seems unlikely that he was a dismal student. “I was a bit of a hell raiser,” he says. “Rebellious, really anti-structure.”
What saved him, though, was literature. He remembers his mother reading Captain Courageous to him. It wasn’t just that she read, but how she read. “I was allowed to doodle, to play Legos, but I was listening. I think that was a gift. I wasn’t the kind of kid who could sit still. I read Tarzan of the Apes, the Hardy Boys. My favorite book was Alice in Wonderland. It started a whole new genre of the ridiculous.”
James tells the story of the next chapter of his life as well as any author. He didn’t graduate from high school, but he did steal his diploma, since it was already printed and there with the others, just asking to be taken. In the months prior to the graduation ceremony, his father had flown him to Arkansas to visit John Brown University, where sixteen of his other relatives had gone. “I looked around at the pretty girls, and said, ‘Yep, this is where I want to be.’” So that fall he showed up for class and stayed at JBU for about two years. It took him four more colleges, and much student debt, before he finally earned his degree.
Besides dropping out of school a lot, he was also fired several times. Those years taught him much. He looked at the ways companies were being run and he unraveled what he believed their problems were. He joined the Air Force Reserves and became a medic, serving for four years, and for a while took classes to become a nurse. And at some point, he looked at his dad, a general contractor who’d started several successful businesses, and realized he could learn a lot from him, something that hadn’t occurred to him in his rebellious years. That, he says, was the turning point, when he began to operate in the world differently.
What he does today, besides oversee WearLit, is consult with businesses on structure and procedure, and spends time with employees, listening to their ideas, finding ways to make things run smoother, which helps the bottom line. The irony of how his non-conformist life has changed is not lost on him.
On a recent day, he spent three and a half hours reading Jack London’s Call of the Wild, looking for a passage that would go well with a picture of a wolf. (He knows a guy who’s stellar at drawing wolves, and occasionally he and Rick use guest designers.) “That’s my job,” he said. “Sitting and reading Jack London.”
He shakes his head, amazed by this stroke of luck. James begins to talk about the staying power of great art. “I played MacBeth in a high school play. I learned hundreds of lines. Beautiful writing. Today, at twenty-six, I can still recite whole passages.”
And then he says, “Books are like movies playing in my mind. I’ve had a love affair with books for as long as I can remember.” It’s a gorgeous way to describe reading, and it’s certainly a good reason to start a company that takes us back to the moment we first discovered a favorite passage, when we read it and believed it had been penned for us alone, no matter how long ago it was written.
To see their full line of T-shirts, visit wearlit.com.
