Where we come from...
Ripple Junction is one of the largest and most successful purveyors of licensed apparel in the world. Yesterday, we were two dudes with a van full of shirts.
Ripple Junction started in 1992 when our esteemed president, Neil Hoynes, and some of his college buddies sold shirts out of the back of a road-worn van, affectionately dubbed The Denterprise, in order to finance a nomadic summer of following the Grateful Dead. Cliché? Perhaps. But it worked. Fellow Deadheads were impressed with the quality of our shirts, and when they started asking if they could buy the shirts wholesale, Ripple Junction was born.
In its infancy, Ripple Junction was little more than a bunch of dudes roaming the crowds selling shirts, necklaces, and friendship bracelets at Lollapalooza, Taste of Chicago, Horde, and other places where large groups of hip people would gather. In 1993, Scott Andersen met Neil and his band of nomadic gypsies at Jazz Fest in New Orleans. Having just returned from teaching English to schoolchildren in Mexico, Scott was young, eager, and broke. He joined the Ripple Junction team and we continued to follow the Dead until Jerry Garcia's death in 1995.
By that time, Ripple Junction had grown into a full-fledged business with actual brick-and-mortar stores. In fact, much of the '90s were spent just trying to keep the lights on in these stores. And, to our credit, we only ended up losing power one time. In 2000 we turned off the lights in our retail stores forever in order to concentrate on what we loved about the business in the first place—creating top-notch graphic T-shirts.
At the dawn of the new millennium, we turned our focus to licensed entertainment properties, starting with the cult classics—The Lost Boys, The Goonies, Gremlins, and Voltron, among other throwback favorites. These shirts hit the market just as the first wave of '80s nostalgia broke over America, launching Ripple Junction to a new level of success.
Today Ripple Junction works regularly with such heavy hitters as Warner Bros., Fox, Universal Studios, Paramount, Proctor & Gamble, HBO, ABC, VIZ Media and Cartoon Network, and we’ve been named to License Magazine's Top 100 Global Licensees list five years running. Yet, after almost twenty years of success, Ripple Junction's long, strange trip has only just begun. Thanks for joining us.
The Ripple Junction Brand
Ripple Junction’s brand strategy is simple: To create top-quality graphic designs that appeal to the fans of our extensive roster of licensed properties, while generating strong sell-throughs for our wide range of retail partners. To this end, we seek out the hottest properties in the following categories:
-classic films
-pop culture icons
-retro TV shows
-anime
-corporate brands
-classic rock
-video games
What we do...
We create fun and innovative designs for high-profile properties across multiple mediums, including television, movies, music, sports and corporate brands.
Some of the merchandise we create:
-tees
-hoodies
-tank tops
-raglans
-sweatshirts
-hats
-Halloween costumes
-plush
-barware
-bowling shirts
-Christmas ornaments
-keychains
-lunchboxes
-patches
Our Mission
Ripple Junction’s mission is nothing short of becoming the industry’s premier licensed apparel manufacturer. We strive to achieve this by pairing top-notch graphic design with on-time, accurate delivery and outstanding customer service for all channels of distribution. We are a regular and valued supplier to most every key national retailer, all while maintaining one of the most robust shelf-stock programs available anywhere.
The positive results of our approach have landed us on License Magazine’s Top Licensee list five years running, as well as being both a preferred vendor of many retailers and the go-to licensee for several major licensors. The fruits of our labor of love can be seen on the shelves of thousands of retail stores across the country and online in major online t-shirt retail stores.