What was scheduled to be a thirty-minute call turned into nearly two hours of anecdotes and bonding over a shared culture. From the designs themselves to the marketing and websites, these brands are inseparable from their creator and saturated with experience.

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    Without further ado, welcome to the first interview of our new fashion series, 30 Minutes with.

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What inspired your brands, Coastal Cult and Death Plant?

Coastal Cult was inspired by my surroundings and trips to the beach growing up. When Coastal Cult first came to mind, there was an explosion of happy beach brands that didnʻt match my experiences with the beach. Growing up, every time I visited the beach, it was overcast, but still carefree like these brands promoted but in a different way. At the time, I was doing a lot of West Coast stuff and grim beach art, when the name Coastal Cult crossed my mind, I knew it was perfect. Once I settled on the idea for Coastal Cult, I became a Jack of all trades to run the brand myself. I taught myself HTML and after researching website design, I designed the website to best represent the brand and optimize the user interface. I also did almost all of the photography and a bit of modeling for the brand.

Death Plant was a combination of my darker personality with the co-ownerʻs bright, earthy vibes. We knew each other in high school but never hung out, one day Nate came across Coastal Cult, he hit me up and was like “Wow this is amazing! I love your work; we have to do something together” and that was the birth of Death Plant. We did the first drop shortly after; the collection used bright colors and strong earthy greens to ground the designs. Death plant is a juxtaposition of this positive, carefree, stoner dude with the best vibes you can have, and my grim art style; I was the death, and he was the plant. We had a lot of different inspirations at the beginning like Little Shop of Horrors and The Hundreds, that we mixed together with our own personalities and Death Plant came out somehow.

 

How did you begin designing?

In high school, Nate Goff (the co-owner of Death Plant) actually inspired me to start putting my designs onto tee-shirts, though he never knew it. Nate was this really cool kid with his own skate brand, and he gave a speech on why he loved his brand and everything he does with it; it made me decide to change my life and begin designing.

Growing up, I was always into fashion; when I was 9, I made a scarf out of stuffing I ripped from a pillow, everyone made fun of me but I didnʻt care because I liked it. After years of doing weird stuff like that, people started liking it, but I had to go through years of people making fun of me for things like sewing weird pockets on the front of my shirt until that got cool in 2012. People started offering to buy shirts with the front pockets from me and thatʻs how I got started. I would draw the designs on an old iPod 4 using Adobe Draw. Some of the stuff you have bought from me have designs that were drawn with my index finger on an iPod 4—those designs would take me like six weeks to complete because the screen was so small and cracked.

 

What juice would you be?

Jungle Juice. I knew this question was coming and instantly decided on Jungle Juice.

 

Who are your primary fashion influences in your own wardrobe?

I am inspired by everyone and everything, I have a very eclectic taste in music and fashion that blend together. The only thing that I wear that is brand associated are Vans or Converse. My pants are Walmart, my shirts are Walmart unless Iʻm wearing something I designed. Iʻm always wearing my own shirt or hoodie with some basic joggers from either Walmart or Marshals, and bright white vans or converse. People always think I have this great sense of fashion but really if you wear a nice pair of shoes, it will always bring the outfit together.

Iʻm just not a consumer and it sucks—Iʻve had brand owners be like “Man you don’t support my shit” and theyʻre right, but itʻs just because I am not a consumer. I think that helps me with my brands, though, I just make things that I think are really cool with no idea of how they might sell.

 

Vans or Converse?

Iʻve been on my Converse shit a lot lately but I love Vans. Vans are my number one, always. I wear white converse because I ride motorcycles, work out, hike, and the ankle support canʻt be beat. You can tighten the high-top Converse tight enough to cut off the blood flow and it provides the ankle support I need.

I followed up quoting one of my favorite movie lines, “Number one in your heart, number one on the field” and expressed my fondness for Vans.

 

Faceless recently sold his half of Death Plant and is now perusing gun customization and diving more into photography

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~Reagan  Thornley