From a sketch on a napkin to a retail shop in Quincy
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On a mild summer morning in South Boston, a group of 12- to 14-year-old boys pours into the steel-and-glass EpiCenter building, shouting over the snaps of a snare drum and the dull boom of bass coming from a DJ booth. They are here for the Beantown Breakdown, a hip-hop convention of sorts in South Boston highlighted by a breakdancing competition. “Yo, these shirts are hype,” says one of the boys, approaching a vendor table covered in rainbow stacks of t-shirts and staffed by Jonathan Mendez, BA ’08, and his sister Olivia Chamberland, BS ’99, MS ’01, CAGS ’02, collectively known as Zamforia Industries.
Behind the table, Zamforia’s full wares are displayed-a radiant collection of their signature t-shirts featuring designs built around the word love spelled out in different languages. There’s a bright, fire-engine-red number with an antique white eagle spreading its wings and sporting a crown-an adaptation of Poland’s coat of arms-beneath the Polish miłość. An electric collage of red, green, and gold surrounds bold, blocky Amharic lettering on Zamforia’s Ethiopian shirt. A light tan shirt with fine green stitching spells out gra in Celtic green, spread from the heart to the left shoulder over a bed of hops and wheat.
Each of the boys takes a cartoonish yellow-and-red ZAM! sticker from a stack on the table. One of them peels off the back of the sticker and carefully places it on his backpack, pressing it neatly down to iron out the bubbles. Another affixes it to his pantleg. Others follow suit. Suddenly, there is a small army walking through the Beantown Breakdown marketing Zamforia. Neither Olivia nor Jonathan asked them to do it-it just came about naturally. Which is exactly the way Zamforia would have it. They understand that sometimes, the more you push, the more the market shuts down. “It’s not just what we’re selling here,” says Jonathan, reaching up to clothespin a few more shirts to the rack behind the table. “It’s how we are selling it.”
Zam stickers spotted around Boston and beyond:
Tomorrow, Zamforia will travel to the SoWa (south of Washington) market in Boston’s South End, an upper-middle class neighborhood of upscale brownstones. The crowds at each event, understandably, differ greatly, and creating a piece of clothing that appeals to both high school hip-hoppers in Southie and professionals in the South End would seem impossible. But Zamforia’s shirts allow everyone who sees them to find something different. It may be cultural pride for some. Or the eye-catching designs, with their hidden messages and meanings. Or maybe, like love itself, the shirts’ appeal is universal, as Jonathan likes to say.
Looking back on it now, his current role as the creative mind behind Zamforia makes sense to Jonathan. He spent his childhood days creating, occupying full days building worlds from Legos and K’NEX. In high school, his interest in architecture resulted in a small scholarship for a project that included sketching and planning a new house using his current home’s foundation. As an undergraduate at Suffolk, his friends were a creative group, and when he, too, began sketching and drawing, he’d often receive compliments on his work.
But for all of Jonathan’s creative abilities, Zamforia began with a drawing by Olivia. In late 2004, at a mandatory team-building seminar she attended for her job as a social worker for the state Department of Social Services, she went off on her own for one of the exercises, charged with drawing a picture. “It was supposed to be anything that made you feel happy, loved, safe-something that just made you feel good,” says Olivia, who now works as a personal trainer. She sketched a picture of her mother’s living room, a fire in the fireplace and her brothers Jonathan and Alex playing guitar. It was an admittedly simple drawing. But she sent copies to her brothers, accompanied by a brief explanation of how much she loved them.
Looking to return the favor, Jonathan, then a cash-strapped freshman at Suffolk, took the picture and redrew it as a Christmas present. Olivia was floored by the result. “It was amazing,” says Olivia. “Now it wasn’t a stick figure sketch anymore. It was colors, and designs, and decorations.” Jonathan had also surrounded the living room scene by the word love written in different languages. She blew it up to poster-size and hung it on her wall in a frame. At her apartment, Olivia showed her brother the poster. “Jonathan, these are amazing,” she told him. “I want you to make a logo because we’re going to make t-shirts that say love on them in different languages.”[flickr album=72157624798082116 num=5 size=Small]
The first version of the concept the duo produced was an olive shirt that spelled out love in Tibetan in yellow. To make sure they got the language and the feeling right, they visited a Tibetan restaurant in Cambridge one night in early 2005, camera and questions ready. They first approached the hostess, who called in the chef for help. The chef arrived, apron covered in food, to weigh in. Books were produced, and then a dictionary. Eventually six members of the restaurant staff joined in the discussion. Jonathan and Olivia walked away with notes on napkins, and pictures of pages from Tibetan dictionaries, confident that they had their first shirt.
For the first few years, there were just two: the one with love in Tibetan and one with the logo-the word love written as an ambigram, which reads the same way when turned upside down. While Jonathan spent a year studying in Spain, Olivia made displays for the shirts and carried them around to local holiday markets and high school fundraisers. “I figured I’d make a few shirts, just to make my sister happy,” says Jonathan. “But then she started really selling them.”
By 2007, the end of Jonathan’s junior year at Suffolk, he started taking the t-shirt business more seriously. He would stay in on Friday nights and work on designs for entire weekends at a time. “I’d wake up and all I would think about was the company.”
His breakthrough came after he designed the Polish version-the bright red shirt with the eagle-after heavy encouragement from Polish members of his family. “From afar, it is simple,” says Jonathan. “But when you look at it closely, it is completely abstract. These certain awkward shapes somehow make an eagle.” The shirts, Jonathan realized, could have more than one dimension. “That was the first time that I realized that the best way of doing this is to have very simple things [on the shirts], but within that simple thing, making it complicated and deep,” says Jonathan. “Just like love-simple and fun yet complicated and deep.”
Subsequent shirts offer subtle messages and hidden treasures-nods to narratives, to friends, to Boston. The shirts became more personal and more intricate as histories, cultures, and memories were woven throughout the designs.[flickr album=72157624797766628 num=5 size=Small]
On the Ethiopian shirt, a unicorn and lion-taken from the façade of Boston’s old state house-sit above the Amharic letters. The lion connects the shirt to both the city and Rastafarian culture, which reveres the lion as a symbol of former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, who is believed to be God incarnate. In between them, a small scroll reads “I and I,” a reference to the Rastafarian belief that God lives within everyone. The Irish shirt contains not only a hidden dedication to a deceased childhood friend but also references to Cross, Anthony, and Orange Streets-an intersection that was at the center of the old Five Points neighborhood in Manhattan in the mid-1800s, populated by a great number of poor Irish immigrants and made famous by the film Gangs of New York. There’s also a personal hidden message that appears above the crown held by two claddagh hands-icons borrowed from the ring of the same name that represent love and friendship. It reads, “BE EC,” which Jonathan says stands for “Be Eric Clapton.” It’s a note to his young cousin Zach, whom Jonathan encourages to chase his dream of becoming a legendary guitar player.
The designs have become stories, with layers of meaning and depth. People taken in by the lush colors and eye-catching designs are then invited to see the second side. “Once you dig deep enough into it,” says Jonathan, “a whole other level pops up.”
Bostonians who haven’t seen the shirts may have seen the “ZAM!” stickers. Fans of the company have affixed them everywhere from light poles on Massachusetts Avenue to street signs in Chicago. The word is out, allowing Jonathan to bask in a bit of celebrity. “It’s kind of cool when you hand somebody a sticker, and they say, ‘Oh that’s you?'” he says. As Zamforia grows into a more serious operation, there are more questions to answer. “We’re putting money into it, we’re doing well, people love the product. Now how are we going to maintain that?” says Olivia. The goal, she says, is to go nationwide. Who knows? Maybe even international.
But the next step is a tricky one, as expansion can be a blessing and a curse. The ethos of cool requires a very fine balance of sales and singularity, which means not just selling their inventory to the first place that cuts a check for a box of shirts.[flickr album=72157624675020277 num=5 size=Small]
In October, 2009, four years after it all began, Zamforia opened a store at 188 Sea Street in Quincy, Massachusetts. “We have a command center,” says Jonathan. There is a lottery-winning kind of excitement in his voice as he ticks off all the wish list items that can now be fulfilled: “We have a shop, an office space, a studio for me, and storage.” He anticipates a Cheers-type atmosphere: “You know, where everyone knows your name.” A big, beautiful sign in the window reads: “Zamforia Industries-Home of the ‘It Says Love’ Shirts.” The new retail shop also coincides with a redesign of their web site, www.zamlove.com.
Though he has the natural self-assurance of a seasoned merchant, Jonathan says his plan for Zamforia is still in its early stages. “The way I look at it, we’re just a year into this thing,” he says. “We’re only at the beginning of what we really want to do.”
The grand plan includes the tentatively titled Zamfest, an annual music festival featuring local artists performing in the spirit of Zamforia. Jonathan believes that eventually Zamforia could become not only a business, but also an organization that gives back. Maybe someday, there could be “Zamforia campers” sent to other countries to learn about other cultures and become global citizens, he says.
But all of that is years away. “Right now,” says Jonathan, “We have to sell t-shirts.”
