I have a habit of starting with a fairly simple idea and then somehow finding myself three miles down the road wondering exactly how I got there.
This time, it started with T-shirts.
More specifically, Halloween T-shirts.
My wife and I are big fans of Halloween Horror Nights here in Orlando, and with another HHN season approaching, I started playing around with the idea of creating a few shirts of our own.
Nothing terribly ambitious.
A couple of designs. Something fun to wear to the parks. Maybe put them online and see if anyone else liked them.
That was the plan.
You can probably already tell where this is going.
The more I worked on the designs, the more I realized that I wasn't particularly interested in making the kind of Halloween shirt you can find everywhere else. You know the ones. Black shirt. Scary thing. Blood. Dripping letters. Possibly a skull. Probably several skulls.
Nothing wrong with that.
It just wasn't what I wanted to make.
I kept coming back to old Florida.
Not old Florida in the historical sense, necessarily. More the Florida that existed on postcards, travel brochures and roadside signs.
The Florida that promised sunshine, palm trees, motels, swimming pools, orange groves and attractions every twenty miles down the highway.
And then I started wondering:
What if something was slightly wrong with that Florida?
What if the cheerful little roadside motel was somewhere you probably shouldn't check into?
What if the smiling vacation postcard came from someplace surrounded by fog?
What if the tourist attraction advertised on the highway had been abandoned for thirty years... but the sign was still lit?
Now that sounded interesting.
And somewhere along the way, the Halloween shirts stopped being individual Halloween shirts.
They started looking like they belonged together.
That's when Vacation From Reality happened.
Vacation From Reality is the name I eventually gave the whole thing.
The idea is essentially a fictional vacation-and-leisure brand from a slightly alternate version of Florida — one where sunny roadside nostalgia and spooky season have always existed side by side.
The designs borrow from vintage tourism advertising, old resort merchandise, souvenir shirts, roadside attractions, travel posters and the wonderfully questionable graphic design choices of several decades.
Some are obviously Halloween designs.
Others aren't.
And that's becoming one of my favorite things about it.
I want someone to be able to wear one of these shirts in July and have another person look at it for a second and wonder:
"Wait... was that a real place?"
If I can occasionally accomplish that, I'll be delighted.
Then things got slightly out of hand.
Because once Vacation From Reality had a name, it needed a logo.
And colors.
And typography.
And rules about what the designs should look like.
Then I started thinking about collections.
Then labels.
Then embroidered shirts.
Then a store.
At some point I realized that I was no longer making a couple of shirts for Halloween Horror Nights.
I was building an apparel brand.
Oops.
The funny thing is, I'm actually rather enjoying that part of it.
There's something enormously satisfying about creating a fictional little world and then finding different ways of suggesting that world existed long before anybody discovered it.
Which is also why you'll occasionally see “Established 1991” appearing in the designs.
If you know, you know.
So what happens now?
For the moment, I'm concentrating on getting the first Vacation From Reality designs finished and into the shop while spooky season is actually happening.
After that?
We'll see.
I've already discovered that this idea doesn't necessarily have to end when Halloween does. There are plenty of strange vacations still waiting to be taken.
And I'll probably share some of the process here — designs that worked, designs that absolutely did not work, where some of the ideas came from, and perhaps a few peeks behind the curtain as this strange little company develops.
Because apparently that's what I'm doing now.
I started out making a few Halloween T-shirts.
And accidentally went on a Vacation From Reality.