Old College Buddies Still Going Lickety-Split
When Dave Patri and his buddies from the graphic arts department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo started Split to showcase their art on T-shirts, they sold the goods out of a cardboard box at a sandwich hangout.
Since moving Split to Huntington Beach five years ago, Patri and company have been using the boxes to ship their fresh, funky garb.
The group of college buddies behind Split has shifted over the years, but original members Scott Van Derripe, 27, and Patri, 26, have remained. In 1990, long-time chum Scott Bailey, 29, changed careers to fashion from electrical engineering, joining Split with financial backing and know-how.
Since its rather humble beginnings in 1988, the Split Collection has expanded to shorts, knit tops, sweat shirts, caps, beanies, hip packs and a denim line of jeans, shirts and jackets. The clothes sell for $16 to $60 at Decades in Laguna Beach, Zac Attac in Huntington Beach and Soho in Irvine.
Split sales have increased in recent years, spurred on by the street-wear trend and its focus on youth culture. But Patri remembers when he balanced two full-time jobs to keep his dream alive. During the two years after graduation in 1989, Patri moonlighted for Split, while designing for Vision Street Wear and later Gotcha.
Despite the stress of working two design jobs, the experience taught him valuable lessons about the industry that he applied to his own company.
Patri decided to use video, a common promotional tool among skateboard manufacturers, to sell Split clothes. Split sends out a video to retailers featuring friends modeling the clothes interwoven with clips of surfing, skateboarding, dancing girls and a disc jockey. The 15-minute presentation sets the mood that Patri hopes will get retailers pumped up to order.
Patri also learned the importance of “staying on the edge, staying fresh.” He attributes much of the inspiration for his designs to skateboarding, and hip hop and techno music.
Among this season’s loose-fitting collection are denim floral shirts; T-shirts in bright, bold colors; and jeans with back pockets on the front, giving the illusion they are on backward, a play on the fad introduced by junior hip-hoppers Another Bad Creation and Kriss Kross.
Several companies in Southern California have come on the scene in the last three years to cater to ravers with oversize apparel and funky graphics screened on T-shirts. But Patri stops short of being “pigeonholed as a rave company,” although he said Split has done well with that market.
“We don’t want to go down with that (scene) when it goes out,” he said.
Patri said many of the companies that focus on the ravers are “becoming popular fast, but can’t keep up with the demand because of an underdeveloped business side. We’ve really made a point to be honest and not be flaky. Even though one of our biggest problems is the demand for the clothes, we don’t want to promise anything we can’t deliver.”
Another tag Patri shuns is that Split is a surf company just because it’s in Orange County--home of surf-wear industry giants such as Quiksilver and Ocean Pacific. “But we do surf,” he said.
“Here (on the West Coast), there’s so much concern (by retailers and consumers) to classify everything,” Patri said. “They don’t know what to do with us.”
Business has been brisk in markets in New York, Japan, Australia and Canada where customers seem less obsessed with labeling and more concerned with product, he said.
But the games that come with being in the industry don’t get the Split guys down. On T-shirts and sweat shirts, on the promotional video and throughout its catalogue, Split hawks what it calls the “positive uplift master plan” designed to make you smile and “lift and open your mind.”
Patri said the Split goal is “to make good, wearable clothes with a positive image. We want to project this positive image in the way the clothes are cut and the kinds of graphics on shirts.”
Good-feeling graphics of smiles, butterflies and cartoon-like characters grace Tees instead of skulls and crossbones. “We want to rid the world of negativism,” he added.
For Patri and the others at Split, the campaign for a better world is not just in the clothes--but in the attitude.
“We’re kind of the happy-go-lucky guys,” Patri said.
