What is Free Lunch?
I wish I could say that this started as some noble attempt to raise money for a good cause. That idea came after. The truth is, this all exists as a way for me to prove a stupid point. I am a firm believer that you don't have to be good at something to do it. It should be enough to just enjoy the process. I know nothing about clothing, about design, about websites, marketing, sales. But why is it such a bad thing to do it anyways? Why is it such a big deal if it were to fail? Therein lies the philosophy that led to Free Lunch; If you want something to exist, make it exist.
The charity aspect came later, as a selfish way for me to prove my point further. I don't care if you buy my stuff. You think I'm lying? Why? I don't get the money anyways. I have literally nothing to gain from this. If you like it, buy it. I'm still not taking your money. That would defeat the purpose. Your dollar never determined my shitty clothes' right to exist. That's all me baby. Feed some kids, buy a shirt. Fuck you.
But how does it work?
It's pretty simple, actually. First we pick a charity. Our go-to is No Kid Hungry. It just makes sense. Kids need lunch, we are Free Lunch. Kind of a slam dunk. However, we are humans with ever evolving human emotions, so sometimes a particular cause grabs our attention. When that's the case, we'll switch up our charity to match that. In the interest of honesty, we'll always let you know what charity it may be, but if you don't see anything, you can just assume we're back to the basics.
The next step is to design the product. We start with a really really rough sketch of whatever fever dream induced concept we thought up. Then we find someone with real talent to turn that sketch into the designs you've come to know and tolerate. We are 100% committed to always working with real artists for our designs. No AI nonsense.
Then comes the fun part. We get to shoot our silly little promo pictures. Between the planning, the prep, the actual taking of pictures, and the editing after, the full shoot process can take weeks. I think we've gotten pretty good at it, but even in those moments where we need help, we source that out to professionals, because again, no AI nonsense.
Finally, we launch the product. From the moment it hits our store until the moment it leaves, the product is there for a good cause. The goal is to get as much money to our charity as possible, but we do also want to stick around and do this more. For every sale that's made, we run some numbers. A portion of the sale comes back to us for the operations cost. We want to make sure our team is compensated for their time, and we have to make sure the lights stay on. The rest of the sale goes to the charity, so no matter if you buy the first shirt, or the 100th, your sale is helping someone who needs it. everytime. AND, in the event we do recoup all of the costs from a product launch, we stop taking that portion of the sale, and send it all to charity.