Tomi's T-Shirt: The Story of One Boy's Goal to Help No Kid Hungry

I am very fortunate to have three wonderful nephews and one niece. They live 45 minutes away in NJ and I see them at least once a week. The two older ones Rafi and Tomi have become very interested in what we do over the last few years. They helped test out our backpack samples, what better way to test durability than to give a bag to a 10-year-old, and the various camp shorts samples. Every so often they pitch me ideas, like our last batch of hoodies, and both have been asking to design a shirt.

Tomi’s birthday is in December, the day after mine. So, he asked if we could get t-shirts made for our joint birthday celebration, known as Tomi and Tio day. I told him it is really expensive to print a handful of t-shirts. So maybe we could design one, sell them and donate the proceeds to charity. After a brief talk about what charity options there were, he chose helping feed hungry kids. One of our friends has done work with no kid hungry  and I was familiar with the charity.

Once Tomi got the go ahead, he pulled his trusty Chromebook and started looking at reference images to send his tia Hillary, he wanted a cartoonish look, a panda sitting, holding a fishbowl with a small octopus in it. Tomi loves animals and is a walking encyclopedia of animal facts. Octopus is his favorite animal. He told me “octopus have three hearts, so they love everybody like me”. Hillary got to work and once her drawing was approved by the tiny project manager, we moved on to color and picking the right T shirt.

Since USPS was a disaster during the holiday season, we waited until now to kick off this project. We will run a presale for a week, send the number to our print shop, once the shirts are printed, we will ship as soon as we receive it. We will donate all the proceeds to No Kid Hungry. Our project manager set a goal of selling fifty shirts, I think we can surpass that goal, you can pre order a shirt here and help feed hungry kids all over the US.