Our Story

On April 1st, 2015 my sister Kristine was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. April Fools! (we wished). She was totally fine her whole 20 years of life until she had a repeated fever/fatigue for about a month, but powered through it because she figured it was nothing serious. Then her aspiring nurse roommate convinced her to go to the ER. When they checked her out, they said she was a few days away from death if she had not gone in. From that point on, life totally changed for Kristine. She had to quit her job and was not able to many things that were once normal, because she was so weak and you just can't with such a compromised immune system during treatment.

Long story short, she started chemotherapy treatment and spent the next few months pretty much bedridden. I (sister Brianna – no, I’m not a nun) also took the jobless route to hang out at home and in hospitals with her, make her eat, and keep germs away from her (especially important because in 2003, our older brother was fighting cancer and died when he caught a nasty flu). While all the eating, sitting, and hours on end of Netflix was great for a little while, we started to get super bored, and I felt myself wasting away to a pile of mush. I started going to the gym, but I needed some workout clothes and couldn’t bring myself to buy normal boring stuff in the stores. I NEEDED working out to be fun - and what better way to do that than to wear fun? So, Kristine sketched a llama, put a funny saying by it, and we copied it onto a shirt with a sharpie. Before Kristine’s next hospital trip we bought some supplies and went to work making more. It was SO much more fun than being glued to a TV screen. During the four day stay, we created several new designs, I started building this website, and we met the sweetest young woman fighting lymphoma who we gave our first shirt to. Within the week, all our friends wanted our shirts and were requesting more designs we hadn’t even created yet. And that’s how the cookie crumbled. We found ourselves constantly laughing out loud in the hospital over the animal shirts and puns we drew. Some of the best medicine! We hope you love them as much as we do and they bring laughter to you too!

Oh, and an update on Kristine: her entire treatment will be finished in July 2017 if all goes well. As of now (10/10/15), she is six months into it (which is a little more than half-way through the really intense part of the treatment). There are good days and harder days, but she’s taking it like a rock star and doing great. She’s a little slow at creating our designs, but that’s why I (Brianna) am around…I keep her in line.

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