Butler Stuff
As Ike Butler’s brainchild, Butler Stuff is the spiritual cousin to Teeny Mammoth: it’s like they did everything together as kids, then grew up to have different careers. One makes brands and websites, another sells cartoonishly existential t-shirts and hats. You know how cousins get.
Jordan McDonnell (Photography)
The Origin Story
Roughly 20 years after crash-landing here on Earth and making the best of it, Ike Butler found himself perpetually distracted in his college classes. Toward the end he managed to finish each semester with more doodles than notes. After showing his human friends the drawings, a few of them said “I would, like, totally wear that on a shirt, or whatever.”
In September 2019, he decided to launch a t-shirt company for all these poor shirtless friends of his, and Butler Stuff was born. It's turned into a product line led by fun and existential characters, with apparel that earns compliments with delightful frequency. The challenge here was to make a t-shirt more than a t-shirt through branding, art direction, and a killer website, centered around taking absurdity really seriously.
Brand World-Building
What makes these t-shirts different from a Hanes three-pack at Marshall's? The personality and the world of the brand. This world is populated by an eccentric collection of sentient doodles, who they blackmail the artist into making a bunch of new drawings. They think the birth of each new creature will bring them closer to understanding why they exist in the first place, or something like that. By wearing these drawings, you too can give them life.
With the doodles drawn, vectorized, productized, and trained in Judo, choosing the visual identity around them was a lot of fun. It became an absurd, goofy, and existential identity full of charm and whimsy and and stop-taking-things-so-seriously. A photo shoot with friends in Joshua Tree and West Hollywood made the brand world that much more inhabitable.
What About A Website?
For launching a brand with such unserious energy, it gets so much funnier the more seriously we take it. This meant I had to make the website as polished as possible, to make such a silly world believable. The designs and copy bring together the same elements of optimism, playfulness and offbeat skepticism that pulses through the brand. All so you can buy, I don't know, a hat with littleballoon guys on it.
Totally worth it. I'll bite at any brand or website project that wants this sort of energy for their business.
