At 16 years old, two years before my Abitur (German high school degree), I had gotten it into my head that I wanted to race Supermoto—a form of motorcycle racing. Since my parents had absolutely nothing to do with that kind of stuff, they had to be convinced, because they would be the ones paying for all the fun. Up until then, I had mostly been skateboarding, which didn’t require much equipment besides the board itself, skate shoes, and a backpack. Now everything including the motorcycle had to be bought. I was hooked, and alongside school, racing became the absolute center of my life.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in drawing, comics, and TV. At age 14 I started designing T-shirt graphics for myself using Photoshop 7.0 on a Windows XP computer—learning on the go. I never cared much for school and wanted to start an apprenticeship as a media designer after the 11th grade so I could go straight to work, instead of staying in school for another year and then studying. My mother saw things differently, though, so in 2008 I moved to Mainz, 50 minutes away from my hometown, to study communication design for a bachelor’s degree.
Both of my parents would soon be retiring; it was going to be impossible to financially support me and cough up even more cash for the motorsport hobby. My ultimate dream at that point was to launch my own streetwear clothing brand during or after my studies, featuring fresh prints and nice fabrics, preferably with a few awesome homies I had yet to meet.
I knew there was a huge demand for motorcycle graphic kits—meaning stickers (kits) printed with graphics and logos, custom-tailored to fit the fairing parts. This barely existed in Europe, and if it did, it was mostly imported from the USA, produced in large quantities as standard designs using the screen-printing process. Digital printing was still pretty much in its infancy, and Google wasn’t as good as it is today. Through the local business directory, I looked for a print shop that could produce the graphic kits based on my files. I would tackle the clothing brand thing later—first, I had to seize this opportunity and be one of the first on the European market.
Because the standard material wasn’t suitable, I had to find a good material combination. The templates had to be traced from each model, scanned, and digitised—my now-retired father, a former technical draftsman, handled the analog work, while I did the digital part. Since I had only worked with Photoshop up to that point, I had to quickly learn Illustrator for this purpose. So I ordered Illustrator CS2, which landed, packed in a typical stylised DVD box, in my mailbox a week later, and gave myself a one-week crash course with very little sleep and a lot of Red Bull.
Because it quickly became clear that the print shops with their standardised processes weren’t capable of producing the motorcycle designs without errors or within an acceptable timeframe, I had to rethink things. I raided my savings account, which was meant to finance my time at university, and bought a large-format solvent printer and a 70cm wide vinyl cutter capable of reliably cutting through the graphic kit’s extra-thick protective laminate. In my parents’ unused but finished 35-square-meter basement, I could set up shop and started regularly commuting to my parents’ house to print stickers at night while designing the ordered graphic kits in the afternoons after university. My father would pack up the finished works the next day to ship them. I had courses to attend.
I didn’t choose them based on what I actually wanted to take, but rather so that they would fit my schedule of working in the afternoons and going to the races Friday morning.
So, attending the university became just a box-ticking exercise, because I actually had “better things” to do. When I rushed out of a marketing class to take the third call within one hour—it was about stickers—I finally managed to make a totally chill professor completely lose his cool. He then suggested I should reconsider whether I even wanted to continue studying, noting it wasn’t the first time I was “selling stuff on the phone” instead of participating in the class. He was right. But I had promised myself to finish my studies with the bare minimum effort just to have something to fall back on, in case the sticker-millionaire thing didn’t pan out.
I didn’t have a clue about business administration, but it definitely felt good to suddenly be financially independent… what kind of taxes are actually tied to that… what do I know? Income minus expenses equals profit, right? And as long as there’s a plus sign in front of it, it’ll be fine. While all my fellow students met up for joint projects and parties on weekends, I worked alone or was at some racetrack. The social connection to the “design scene” was suddenly completely missing, and I saw myself as an outsider in my studies. My focus had shifted from “I want to study this to make good design and need money on the side for my expensive hobby” to “I can make good money with stickers! What else do I need?”
But eventually, I would surely move away from it and finally start that clothing brand I’d been wanting for so long! First, though, I still have to pull through all the open orders by next week, otherwise everyone will be disappointed if I show up at the racetrack empty-handed….
