Happy Fish Water: From Thrift Shops to Offensive Meme Shirts

This didn’t begin as a business; it began at a thrift store. I was a kid working around stacks of old novelty shirts from the 80s, the kind that made you stop, squint, and wonder who printed them and why. Something about that mix of awkward humor, bad art, and bad taste just clicked for me. That’s when I realized funny shirts were my thing.

Then came the bands, the music, and the merch tables. I learned to screen print, first for my own band, then for friends, and eventually from side hustle to business. By 2010, I’d opened a custom screen-printing shop in Seattle and in between client jobs I started printing my own ideas. Designs that felt less like apparel and more like cries for help. Naturally, those were the ones that sold.

I’d drop my worst ideas in local consignment shops, shout-out to Buffalo Exchange in Ballard for putting up with me. I’m talking gems like “Charles Darwin Doesn’t Believe in Evolution” and “This Narwhal Eats Mad Pussy.” Long before meme culture swallowed the internet, I was already cranking out offensive meme shirts before offensive meme shirts existed.

Then a friend came back from Japan with a suitcase full of wonderfully weird shirts, broken English, bad translations, visuals that shouldn’t have worked but somehow did. Seeing those made everything click. There was something special about a shirt that was offensive, weird, and absolutely wrong, yet still completely wearable.

I set the idea aside for a while, but it never really went away. The thrift shops, the band merch, the custom jobs, the cursed shirts in consignment stores, even those weird Japan tees, it all kept pointing in the same direction. Like a little tap on the shoulder saying, hey, you should be doing THIS. 

So I did.

Happy Fish Water was born for one reason: to make the worst t-shirts, offensive hoodies, and unhinged garbage apparel on the internet... intentionally. It’s not about looking good, it’s about committing to the bit so hard you lose friends and family.

Welcome to Happy Fish Water. Where shirts are stupid and the jokes are worse.