Our Story

Steve and CJ at a Washington, DC African festival in 2005

My friends and I have been collecting T-shirts most of our lives, long before we started Urban Profile. (And that's a long time because we started Urban Profile back in 1993.)  We purchased T’s from street vendors, and from merchants at various cultural festivals during the summer. This was before shopping on the internet became popular, and before smartphones were available.

It was hard to find good t-shirts back then. The quality of a lot of the t-shirts we found wasn’t very good, and there wasn’t enough variety. (We couldn’t wear our Black by Popular Demand T’s every day.)  Not only that, we were surprised to find a lot of vendors didn't make larger sizes. Not sure why many sellers didn't make T-shirt sizes larger than 1XL or 2XL. 

When we decided to make our own t-shirts, we wanted to fix these issues: We focused on good quality and strong messages. (And we carried sizes up to 5XL.) People asked us where we got our t-shirts, and we proudly said: “we made them”.

We began selling our designs at local fairs and festivals. With the growth and popularity of the internet, we knew we had to find a way to make our t-shirts available to everyone, not just people in our local area. And that’s why we started UrbanProfile.com.

- Steve