My Story
Chapter one
Life beginns after school.
At 16 years old, two years before my Abitur, I had gotten it into my head that I wanted to race Supermoto (a form of niche motorcycle racing). My parents of course 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. Now everything including the motorcycle had to be bought. I was hooked, and alongside school, racing became the absolute center of my life.
Before that, I’ve been interested in drawing and comics since I was little and already started designing T-shirt graphics for myself at age 14 using Photoshop 6.0 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 to get my Abitur and then study. My mother saw things differently, though, so in 2008 I moved to Mainz, 46km or 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 their studying son and cough up even more cash for the motorsport hobby. My ultimate dream for me (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.
But since I needed money and 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.
Because the standard material wasn’t suitable, I had to find a suitable material combination. The templates for the later cutting had to be traced from each model using transparent adhesive film, 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 Adobe Illustrator for this purpose. I ordered Illustrator CS3, which landed in my mailbox a week later in a typical adobe stylized DVD box, and gave myself a one-week crash course with very little sleep and a lot of Red Bull.
Starting some kind of business.
It quickly became clear that the print shops with their standardized processes weren’t capable of producing the motorcycle designs without errors or within an acceptable timeframe, I had to rethink things. To make money, you have to spend money first, right? I would tackle the clothing brand thing later—first, I had to seize this opportunity.
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 setup shop and started regularly commuting from my apartment in Mainz to my parents’ house to print stickers.
I didn’t choose my university courses based on what I actually wanted to take, but rather so that I could go to the races on time on friday and work through everything that piled up in the afternoons. 1-2 times a week, I would produce everything in my parents’ basement until late into the night and my father would pack up the finished works the next day to ship them. I had classes I needed to attend.
Although I registered a small business, I didn’t have a clue about business administration. 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.
Losing track can sneak up on you.
University felt easy for me, or rather, I smirked at some of the courses and questioned their deeper meaning. 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 for the third time in an hour to take a call—it was about stickers—I finally managed to make a totally chill marketing 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 was now making my money off the people I also spent my free time with, while spending the time outside of my free time making money to spend on my free time. Get it? 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 my “design coleques” was suddenly completely missing, and I saw myself as an outsider in my studies. My work with the motorcycle graphics had absolutely nothing to do with “communication design” but rather “sign-making with a bit of personal character.” And I acted accordingly —Impact is absolutely the best font on the planet, what’s your thing with Helvetica anyway, why is font tracking even so important? The non-designer eye doesn’t pay attention to spacing anyway—look, I can arrange all of this without guidelines too, it’s faster that way.
So 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 “What good design? It’s all completely far-fetched anyway. I can make good money with stickers too.”
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….