About Us
First and foremost, Crisis and Change is a clothing company. These days, we silkscreen on second-hand shirts and other garments in a basement. But we didn’t always live so large.
Crisis and Change’s ancestry traces back to 2009, when cofounder, Oliver Katz, designed and produced his very first t-shirt. The design was an advertisement for his class’s stationary store, the Sharper Pencil, and featured pencils of varying shapes and lengths.
In 2013, the first prototype for the Tokyo design was developed, a design that can now be found on many of our shirts. Using a Tokyo backdrop silkscreen, co founders and lead designers Freddie and Oliver reinvented the design. The Tokyo line will be featured in an upcoming video which takes place in the design’s namesake city.
Experimentation with different printing methods lead us to choose silkscreens, as we had more freedom when combining colors and designs. Silkscreening is also much more hands-on, resulting in more creative control (and a cleaner conscience) than if we were to outsource our production to some faceless shirt-factory in a developing country.
A key philosophy of Crisis and Change is that we print exclusively on second-hand clothing, for two main reasons:
1. Since each garment we print on is different, we approach each one with a different vision of design, and ensure that no two products are the same.
2. Using second-hand clothing also ensures that our work is more environmentally-friendly, pushing the impending global climate apocalypse back by a few hours.
Beyond clothing, Crisis and Change is also a larger artistic movement. C&C encompasses a broader body of work, including music, writing and film, among other things. Essentially, Crisis and Change is a venue to create things that matter to us. Check out the accessory pages to see some of our other projects.
That’s about where we are now, printing underground, deep within the bowels of New York City, and returning to the surface occasionally to showcase what we’ve made.
To stay up to date with upcoming releases and experience what we do, follow us on instagram and facebook: @crisisandchange .