Brand On The Rise / Jeepney Clothing

How are you doing today?

Pretty good how about you guys?

That’s great to hear, we’re all good here. So how would you like to introduce yourself to all of our readers? Tell us a little bit about yourself pretty much.

Basically I started Jeepney in 2003, I came from a graphic design background and I used to have a graphic web design firm.

Do you still do anything in the graphic design field?

Not so much, I’m more of a creative director now. I freelance for some companies here and there but basically I’m focusing on Jeepney right now.

So exactly what is your roll or position at Jeepney?

I’m the CEO and the Creative Director.

We just wrote about your most recent release, your Spring line, how did you guys come up with the concept to that?

Usually for every season we try to come up with a theme and for the Spring line we did a rhythm and shoes theme so we were just trying to focus on concepts that incorporated things that our customers like which is girls, music and shoes.

We notice that a lot of your tees incorporate girls, are all the pictures on the shirts ones you guys took yourselves?

Yea, most of them are images that we took ourselves. I mean I have a bunch of designers so some of them I don’t know exactly where they got their images but we do actually do a photo shoot for every season.

How do you select which girls to use?

We basically have a try out/ Lineup of girls. Also if people want to look at some of our shoots you can actually go on our site and we have those videos up.

We see in your clothing line a lot of shirts relating to music, why do you feel that music, more than anything else, is such a great influence to us all?

Well if you guys don’t know what Jeepney is, it used to be American GI jeeps in the Philippines that where converted to public utility vehicles, so basically taxi cabs. This happened after World War 2 and every single Jeepney has its own look and its own style, kind of like what we like to do with our brand. Also it’s very music driven, like if you go to the Philippines, they have all the Jeepneys’ driving up and down the streets blasting there music. So music is a very important part of Jeepney, not just the artistic aspect of it, but the musical part as well. Plus we are all hip hop heads here so we like to incorporate some of our own personal likes in the company giving all the tees some sort of meaning.

That’s good to know, can you give us an example of the meaning behind one of your tees?

For example a lot of the stuff that is musical with the girls on there. The whole series is called Puss and Beats, like the Puss and Boots series.

What do you guys have to offer to the fashion world that other brands might not?

Superhuman strength

HA! I would love to achieve that myself, but how successful would you guys say you’ve been since your launch?

Everyone obviously wants to be more successful then where they are at, but I mean things have been going really good for us thanks to the folks who have supported our brand, so we are pretty happy where we are at because we didn’t think that we would make it this far.

Are there any new projects that you would like to share with us?

Yeah, we’re doing a collab with Wallgreens..J/P! ha….Well we just did a collaboration with Grey One Social in Manila as well as Once Upon a Time. If you don’t know the Upon a Time guys they are the people who do the “We run tees like We run LA, We Run NY, etc”. So those are coming up and they are actually going to be launched this month. Also we are doing a collaboration with Karmaloop which should be out in the next month. And then later this year, we are doing a collab with Antenna Magazine as well as Urb Magazine and New Era caps called the “Pride Series”.

So you guys have a lot of projects going on, do you see Sneaker Maniac as a future collab?

Oh yea definitely man.

Where do you guys see the brand at in, let’s say 5 years?

In 5 years hopefully it will be more of a, not necessarily main street, but definitely leaving a mark in the street wear industry.

Do you guys have any retail shops?

No, we are just basically the manufacturers so we have no retail shops. We do have an online store on jeepneyclothing.com but the majority of our stuff is in other people’s retail shops.

Do you guys ever plan on opening any shops?

Not right now. There are no plans in it in the near future. We like to stick and focus on what we are good at. A lot of people try to branch out too much to the point where they are spreading themselves thin. So basically instead of focusing on one thing and being really good at it people are being really mediocre at a lot of different things and we don’t want to be like that.

Where do you get your inspiration for designs, do you check around other blogs to see what’s in?

Honestly I don’t really try to look at other peoples stuff too much just because you never know how people’s designs might influence you. The main reason is because we are influenced by the same thing like pop cultural things. I mean I do look at blogs in general just to see what’s going on but I don’t try to focus on the other people’s things too much because sometimes their ideas linger in your brain. You might not even realize you’re being influenced but you can just see something and then six months later you are doing something similar to what you saw six months ago even though you completely forgot about it, it’s in the back of your head. So I just try not to focus on it too much and just do my own thing.

Have you ever come up with a design just to see it already have been thought up by another company?

Oh yea definitely a couple times. I know for a fact that it’s happened to most other brands as well.  And like I said we are all influenced by the same thing so it’s hard to not do something that somebody hasn’t closely done before.

So is there anything else you would like to inform our readers about like sales or promotions?

Just keep a look out for the upcoming collaborations and the upcoming seasons. We are going to be coming out with some pretty dope stuff pretty soon. We have a line coming up which is called Sneaker Boxxx and it’s basically going to be chicks and shoes and its going to have a totally different look which I think people are really going to dig.

JEEPNEY Website: http://jeepneyclothing.com