About Us
Our names are Chris Garrett and Mike Holmes and we co-founded The Angry Giraffe Shirt Co in September 2017 in beautiful Nova Scotia, Canada. We enjoy music and motorcycles and BBQing and camping. We’ve been great friends for nearly our entire lives; our wives and families are friends with one another, and our pets would probably even be friends if cats weren’t so territorial and anti-social. We’re both creative and we each have a similar and slightly bizarre sense of humour that we like to share with others (not everyone can appreciate our comic genius). We’d like to tell you that The Angry Giraffe Shirt Co was born in the fashion houses of New York, Paris or Milan and that the designs are the products of some of the greatest fashion artists in the industry. That would not be entirely true, however. In fact, the idea to draw simple pictures on shirts and share our creativity and humour with others came to us over a campfire and a few beers. The more we talked about the t-shirts we’d like to make, the more we laughed. Our favourite idea was the “angry giraffe” – when has anyone ever seen an angry giraffe? – and we decided that would be the company name and logo if we actually had a shirt company (sadly, that’s as profound as the origin of the company name gets). Then came the “A-ha!” moment: maybe we COULD have a shirt company! We’d do our own drawings, have them printed on shirts and sell them in an online store…simple! Okay, it hasn’t been quite that simple, and fortunately we both have real full-time jobs. Obviously, we’re never going to get rich selling shirts with our original artwork on them, but that’s fine. The entire process is fun and still makes us laugh as much as we did that first day around the campfire. It’s very rewarding when complete strangers stop us and say, “I love your shirt!”, and it’s even more fun when they learn that they can buy one themselves and are soon wearing our shirts. It’s also very rewarding to use our business to help support the conservation and welfare of animals – specifically, the giraffe. While researching topics for our company, we came across the Giraffe Conservation Foundation (“GCF”), where we learned that the giraffe was in fact a vulnerable species whose population had declined dramatically over the past 30 years because of habitat challenges and poaching (no wonder the giraffe is angry!). We saw this as a natural cause for The Angry Giraffe Shirt Co to support, so we became a “Giraffe Explorer” and adopted Dobby, a young giraffe in Namibia. We hope to do even more in the future. (For more information about this important cause, please see the “Help Us Support Giraffe Conservation” section of our website.)
Someday, The Angry Giraffe Shirt Co may become a powerful fashion empire, at which time we will probably rule the world. Until then, we will continue to have fun drawing on shirts, supporting the GCF and sharing our creativity with you and the rest of the planet.
