Homeless guys start a T-shirt company

Have you ever flicked on the TV randomly and had a show come on that it just seemed you were meant to see.  That happened to me this morning.  In my last blog post I vented about my frustration with not being able to find a job, and other negativity I deal with on a daily basis.  That rant wasn't the best blog post, but sometimes you just need to blow off steam, and that's what I did in that post.  So today, I turned on the TV and it went automatically to channel 14, the Time Warner Cable news channel.  It's a channel I rarely watch, except for when there's bad weather heading this way.  They have weather updates every ten minutes, and for someone without a smart phone, like me, to check the weather, the TWC news channel works well.  Other than that, I rarely turn that channel on.  So today, as the picture came up, it was right at the start of a story about two formerly homeless guys in Raleigh that had an idea, and started a T-shirt company.

The idea started when they were both homeless, and were hanging out downtown, and a guy walked up with a shirt that had just one word on it, that word was "college."  That reminded one of these guys of the Animal House movie, I guess John Belushi had the same shirt.  So they struck up a conversation with the guy in the college shirt, and talked for 15 or 20 minutes.  Afterward, they talked about how a single word on a shirt led to a lengthy conversation... for homeless men and a "normal" guy.  They wondered what would happen if they actually made shirts with a single word on them.  Would these shirts work to start spontaneous conversations as well?  They threw the idea around for quite a while.  Finally, they decided to go for it.  Conversation Tees was born.  Now these two formerly homeless guys are entrepreneurs building their small business.  They have an apartment, they work regular jobs to pay the bills for now, and they build their business in the rest of their time.

The interview above was the only one I found of them on You Tube.  The audio is a little sketchy, and it's a basic, single camera view.  But they talk about the day to day struggles of being homeless, and how things just seemed to fall into place once they started working on their business idea.  They went from people avoiding the very sight of them when they were homeless to people stepping up to help them get their business going.  As someone who was homeless for quite a while and who is now trying to create my own job/small business, it just seemed like I was meant to hear about these guys today.  The video above is about 15 minutes, and they tell their story.  For more info, you can check out the Conversation Tees website here, and even order a shirt if you want to.  In addition, they give a part of their proceeds to groups that help the homeless.  It's a good deal all around, I'm glad I came across this story, maybe some of you will like it , too.