[We first caught up with Jason, and the story behind To Die For.]

First off, how’d you get into screenprinting and the whole t-shirt game?

Music was my second love to skateboarding. I played the drums in a hardcore band with friends I went to high school with. The skateboard kicked my ass because at the end of the day I had gashes and bruises up and down my shins and tore up hands from trying the hardest tricks and the biggest gaps. My father always told me that a drumstick would never do that. As I got older, I got wiser, and gave up skateboarding as much as I did everyday after school and on the weekends for the (drum)kit.

If I wasn’t going to make a living later on in life from skateboarding, I might as well apply it to my second love of music, and the kit in which my parents backed 100%. I was always business-oriented and always had to have control of everything I set my mind to. I wanted to play in the biggest band of all the bands that played similar music. I wanted everyone to know the name of the band I played in whether they saw it on a bumper of a car or on a t-shirt someone wore. I picked up a do-it-yourself screen printing kit from Aaron Brothers and from there, word got around about me making shirts. From there, I started making everything from shirts and patches to posters.

So after making shirts for other people for years, what encouraged you to start your own clothing line?

We saw all the junk out there that people were designing. I started doing all the band shirts with my eyes closed. All of them had a one-color print on front with a live photo on back. Rarely someone did something original. We moved the company from Riverside to Orange County, Ca. mainly for a customer I found while working part-time booking shows and printing in the garage by night and on the weekends. Once we opened up in Costa Mesa, we began getting local customers in the area that were clothing lines and a bunch of word-of-mouth business. I worked solo mostly. Here and there, Josh (Jason’s brother) would help out. I worked by day doing what I called at the time Die Trying Productions, and Josh worked at a print company by day. By night, he worked on illustrating and designing from hand to the computer. He later on was laid-off and came to work with me full time.

I guess it was one of those things that happened for a reason. When he wasn’t helping on the presses he was outputting film for customers. As he opened files and saw how they were created, he took note. These notes became valuable later on as we launched a couple logos with our own style calling it To Die For, that we would later on take to fests across the states and concerts nearby to sell and put on all of our friends’ and customers’ backs to wear. It only made sense to try and make something of our style, since we were seeing everyone regenerating old logos designed by others and inserting their name - and clothing lines putting something as simple as their 4-year-old kids’ crayon drawings on a shirt and selling it for 30 bucks a pop.

My favorite thing about TDF is that you have such a tight niche market. From what I can tell, the line caters somewhat to the burgeoning hardcore/punk scene – which has been largely untapped because kids in the scene usually wear t-shirts advertising BANDS, not BRANDS. Did you intend to unite these kids through a single clothing brand? Is TDF strictly limited to the punk crowd?

Uniting kids was never a thought that crossed my mind, nor any of our intentions…although I’m sure it has to a certain point. To Die For isn’t strictly for any type of crowd or scene although we have catered to mostly the hardcore/punk/metal/indie scene. We want our customers to relate to our product. By offering our product mostly to this type of crowd, it has worked easier because we already work closely with the bands by printing their tour merchandise. All that I wish is that someone that doesn’t know a single thing about TDF, does their homework after buying our product or seeing it another person’s back.

When I say “Do the homework,” I mean look further than the material and find out about the company’s roots by searching online. Half of the customers out there would never guess that we do this full-time and how hard we work for being this young. Clothing is like music - if you hear it on the radio you want to know more about the band such as the name and the name of the album so you can buy it. Once you own the music you then listen, read the lyrics, and know the members’ names. There have been times that I feel our product has got into the wrong hands, or people I feel that don’t get it, and wear it strictly for the graphics and know nothing about To Die For. We have no control of who buys our product or wears it nowadays considering the multiple ways you can buy our product. Most of our sales are generated online because we don’t have retail stores around the whole entire world yet. Online shoppers are checking out more than just our clothing online.

At the same time, the graphics seem to be more graf-inspired than anything. True? Why is that so? How do you bridge the gap between graf and hardcore?

I would say they are more tattoo-related with a new school twist of graffiti. Tattoos have become much more accepted in society and very popular in the hardcore/punk scene. People recognize this art and relate to it the easiest because everyone surrounding them, and on stage, has (tattoos) at shows. As time moves on, the generation of tattoo and graffiti artists gets younger. I feel as this happens, the less it’s known about the masters of it’s art form and the knowledge behind it that has been given to us to study.

Tattoos are trendy and easy to get these days, but what most people never do is search out the right artist to get something entirely different and original by a master. They usually are lazy and just want to get what others already have. Most of your early-day traditional tattoo art was simple. General colors, thick straight lines, and rough edges and corners. Our new school twist is our concepts, our shading and blended colors with nice clean outlines and detail. From the original drawing, we strive our hardest to make it happen exactly the way it was originally created to the final print.

What bands do you support?

We have a list of the bands we believe in and endorse on our website. Most of these bands such as Throwdown and Eighteen Visions we have worked with since day one in our garage. These bands are our family. We’ve grown with, building what we all do now for full-time careers. It’s crazy to think of how long it’s been.

What’s next for TDF?

We will be downsizing the entire company, meaning cutting out a lot of the headaches we run into everyday here Monday through Friday. We have never had to advertise. All of our business is word-of-mouth. This has been great, but sometimes you get those people that walk in that have no clue. I have no time to teach them about something I feel I’m still learning about even though I have mastered it in certain areas. What am I going to do --charge them for a consultation? Then they’ll start asking me about that.

It’s time we focus on our own line. We’ve been putting it aside for way too long, to work on everyone else’s product, to make them money ‘cause of how good it looks. We do a lot of custom jobs for certain customers that most people would never know where to begin pricing it. We’ve always stood behind our product no matter if it’s for a customer or is our own. Both Josh and I want to be happy again. We want to gain back that love we had when we first started this idea. On top of this we have a couple of other ideas that we will be working on in the mix of this changeover…Ideas that will not leave out our bands and the other people that are part of the reason why we are here to this day.

Growing up in a well-populated gang city, I went to school with nothing but taggers and gangsters. The gangsters never took well to the skaters and hardcore kids. They were always standoffish because we looked different. They weren’t sure if we did drugs or sold them, in which a majority of us were drug-free, including myself. It took a couple of them to figure out what we were all about, and to eventually make friends.

After they found out that most of the music we listened to was heavy like early Metallica and Slayer, they were stoked. I always thought that was so strange that gangsters loved the metal. Being brought up around rock music, hardcore music became a big part of my life because of the friends that I hung out with. With art steaming from my family background, I became interested in the art that surrounded my life everyday on the walls. Tagging was shortly a part of my life in which I learned the art and the aspects of bombing and piece-ing. I picked up my own unique style from the gangster kids that practiced everyday on the bridge walls and inside the class schoolbooks. These are the life experiences that would soon change my life.

I stopped working on classwork and doing the same. I started doodling at age 6. I fell in love with graffiti as soon as I laid eyes on it. The thrill, the fame, the rush, there was nothing like it. I knew I had to have my hands on it. I soon developed a style of my own from my influences and ran with it.

After high school, I felt that it had been a waste of talent to just do illegal graffiti. So it was time to take my art to the next level. I’ve always wanted to do something new and different growing up as an artist. I want to inspire others with my style. I was now heading in the right direction that I felt comfortable with. Surrounding myself with positive influences, this gave me that extra push that I needed to think and create with a clear mind. Being drug-free (straight edge) and involved in the hardcore scene, we wanted nothing to do with mainstream society who forced drugs, alcohol, and sex down your throat. I lived my life for hardcore music and played guitar in several bands through my early years. It seemed as if hardcore and graffiti were born at the same time because they had so much in common that I could relate to it so well. Through both forms of art, I pushed myself as hard as I could through school to be where I’m at today, owning and designing my own clothes, doing gallery shows, and soon designing toys of my own.

You recently did a show with Kid Robot. How did that go? Any other upcoming shows?

The show was packed out the door all night long. It was an amazing show not only ‘cause it had been my 2nd show ever, but the opening was with Gary Baseman. Over the last year in dealing with Kidrobot, they have been some of the best people to work with. Nichole at Kidrobot has shown myself and my company so much love. The show worked out perfectly. It happened just in time for me to show people my Dunny that will be coming soon in Dunny series #2. I got some upcoming shows in the works but nothing set in stone yet.

So are you seeking to establish yourself as more of a distinct artist?

Yeah, I try my best to develop a style that no one has done and create art that inspires others’ hopes, perhaps leading them to inspire their own audience one day. I love to give people a positive outlook. It pushes me to work harder as an artist.

Who are some of your favorite artists?

Wow, that’s a tough one. I have such a broad range of artists that have inspired my work such as: Mear, Trek (the Jeff Soto before art school), my crew BASHERS, Daim, Craola, Twist, Paul Booth, and HR Giger. I hate to be the one who drops names but these are the ones who inspired me to do what I do today just as I want to in the future with others.