what's in a name?
a whole lotta double checking... that's what.
it was 2006 and i was in the last year of my undergrad at Cal State Northridge. i was in a band (Endswell, good luck finding that one), i worked a corporate job (Washington Mutual Mail Clerk, this was before the housing market crashed and it got absorbed by JP Morgan Chase), i was still taking 18 units per semester (staying up all night on Mondays and Wednesdays to memorize Russian or study for whatever pure math courses i was in then) and still found time to skateboard on the regular. it was a recipe for getting the shingles, and it worked like a charm. oh to be young again...
at the time i was painting directly onto shirts with acrylic and house paints. i had a few characters that i would draw then; a dinosaur, a bear, a penguin and, hmmm, there was one more... anyway, paint didn't like to survive the washing machine once it had some layers, even sealing it with wax paper only lasted a few cycles before the fabric couldn't handle it anymore. so i gave into the idea that i could just make some shirts and sell them around town. again, the young thing... well, that meant finding a screen printer and having them produce the lot for me.
i had absolutely no money, but i had an idea and i went for it. the printer didn't bat an eye when i told them each design had 5-7 colors and i wanted to a size run for men and women. i had no idea how utterly wasteful that was, financially, for the first run of unproven merch. but i have never really had much of a problem committing to anything, so what's the worst that could happen, right?
thousands of dollars later i had 6 giant boxes of shirts, which was the minimum since i was determined to have 3 designs, and all i had to do then was sell these in a marketplace that i knew not a single store to go to. i was faced with putting a name to the project, so i stewed on it for weeks.
at first, i was making lists that i wish i had kept, but it was all going in my notes for abstract algebra classes or doodled in the margins of handouts from the prompts for my C++ class. since we're here, i guess i'll just throw this out there, i got a degree in pure mathematics. i was trying to get myself a career as a professor at a community college so i could have free time to skate and make art. killer goals, nerd dreams.
back then, being poorly organized and all over the place did have it's advantages when i was writing everything down in composition books, so instead of losing the ideas of what to name this venture, i got to warp and twist what was coming out with notes from the classes i was in. the big problem was, no ideas are really that unique and the proof of that is found when googling strings of words you hope to find no results for. and thus i found myself with a very long list of taken names as the shirts sat in boxes.
i bring up all of this back story not so that i can dump a bunch of unnecessary details, but to illustrate that i have stuck to this name that came from a time when i was heavily distracted, hyper focused on the task at hand before switching gears to a completely different state of mind or just getting overwhelmed so i would just run away on my board to clear my head. it was a cacophonous time between my ears, and it still kinda is. i guess that's a blessing.
so another night waiting for my 3-hour night lecture on a tuesday to begin and i was flipping through card catalogs at the Oviatt Library when a subtitle of a taxonomy text stands out to me. Something about "Between Family and Species" and i started playing with "genus", before the lecture that night was over, common genus was born. it wasn't out of divine inspiration, a piece of poetry or art, not even a play on words. it just sounded good to me and the esoteric nature gave it some mystique.
it was googled. no one had it. i filled out a DBA request with the newspaper, got a seller's permit, used one of my invites from the gmail beta to start the email account and eventually started a tumblr. i had collar labels woven and eventually got all the shirts tagged. i only ever sold around 40 of them, a major loss of money for me at the time, but i dabbled in running toward something, gathered all of the things i learned and i still can't guess PMS colors very well.
that was my only big attempt at t-shirt designs, i did do a few sinlge color runs of band pun shirts. one was even pretty good... after i closed the boxes up, i started making a zine a few years later and did around 35 issues of that over 4 years. shortly after that, i stumbled upon chainstitch embroidery and i haven't looked back. the name is still intact, i do consider changing all of my handles to just my name since my family name is very unique, but i still stick with what i have. why not?
what i didn't realize is that i would have to forever spell "genus" out and witness the look on countless peoples' faces when they no longer think "common genius" was so clever. oops, to be young again...
stay young. take chances. cheers.