ORIGIN / GRIEF / DARK HUMOR
About R²
R² did not begin with a business plan.
It began with losing both of my parents.
Grief is a strange thing. People have written entire libraries about it, most of which fail to mention the part where your brain occasionally decides that the funniest possible response to an objectively terrible situation is an extremely inappropriate T-shirt.
So I started making them.
Dark humor became a way to process something that was otherwise very difficult to process. The shirts were funny because they were honest. Sometimes aggressively so. They said the things that people who have been through loss think, but are generally discouraged from putting on apparel.
It turned out other people got the joke.
More importantly, some of them needed the joke.
And somewhere between grief, sarcasm, design files, and an increasingly unreasonable number of browser tabs, R² started becoming a thing.
Examine the clothing →
PASSION PROJECTS / RESEARCH RABBIT HOLES
Then We Got Distracted
This happens frequently.
Once R² existed, it became increasingly difficult to convince ourselves that it needed to stay in one lane.
We have interests.
There are many of them.
Science. History. Aviation. Museums. Pop culture. Dark humor. Making things. Saving things. Strange materials. Forgotten stories. Objects with unnecessarily complicated backstories.
The usual.
Those interests started becoming designs. Designs became projects. Projects became research rabbit holes. Some of the rabbit holes developed rabbit holes of their own.
Eventually, some of those passion projects led us to the Tillamook Air Museum and Hangar B.
That was no longer just about making something amusing.
Hangar B is the sort of object that causes R² problems. It is enormous, historically fascinating, technologically ridiculous, irreplaceable, and currently in need of people giving a damn about what happens to it.
Unfortunately for our available free time, we give a damn.
So preservation, the museum, and the effort to keep Hangar B standing became part of the R² universe too.
See What We're Trying to Help Save →
THE FORGE / STRETCHED EARS / AN OBVIOUS DEFICIENCY
And Then There Were Earrings
The latest problem began with a fairly simple observation:
There is a sickening lack of good dangle earrings for people with stretched ears.
Yes, options technically exist.
That is not the same thing.
The selection gets considerably worse if you want something darker, sharper, stranger, or a little more masculine. Apparently at some point society collectively decided that people with gauges who want dangles should choose between a fairly narrow set of aesthetics and be grateful about it.
We objected.
So R² started developing dangle plug earrings.
The idea is simple: make pieces for stretched ears that actually feel intentional. Things with movement. Weight. Metal. Texture. Skulls. Blades. Strange shapes. Objects that look like they belong on the person wearing them rather than something selected because it happened to fit through the hole.
They are not exclusively for men.
They are not exclusively for anyone.
But they are very deliberately being made with people in mind who have looked at the existing options and thought:
Surely we can do better than this.
We can.
So we did.
Examine the Earrings →
OPERATING PHILOSOPHY / APPARENTLY
This Is Apparently a Business Now
That is more or less how R² continues to grow.
Not through carefully engineered market segmentation.
Through problems.
Something makes us laugh when perhaps it shouldn't.
Something deserves to exist but doesn't.
Something fascinating is being forgotten.
Something important is in danger of disappearing.
Something available on the market is offensively boring.
We notice.
Then we start researching.
Then somebody opens another browser tab.
Then there are prototypes.
Eventually an object appears.
We take the work seriously, even when the thing we're making is completely ridiculous. We research. We prototype. We revise. We obsess over details most people will never notice.
If we're going to make something ridiculous, we believe it should be meticulously ridiculous.
That has turned out to be a surprisingly effective operating philosophy.
R² is still evolving. There will be more shirts. More earrings. More Forge pieces. More preservation projects. More strange ideas that nobody requested. More research into subjects with increasingly questionable relevance to whatever started the investigation.
We don't entirely know where it goes from here.
That is part of the point.
We are deeply suspicious of boring things.