Today, Ripple Junction is one of the largest and most successful purveyors of licensed apparel in the world.  Yesterday, we were two dudes with a van full of shirts.

      Ripple Junction started in 1992 when our esteemed president, Neil Hoynes, and some of his college buddies sold shirts out of the back of a road-worn van, affectionately dubbed The Denterprise, in order to finance a nomadic summer of following the Grateful Dead.  Cliché?  Perhaps.  But it worked.  Fellow Deadheads were impressed with the quality of our shirts, and when they started asking if they could buy the shirts wholesale, Ripple Junction was born.

      In its infancy, Ripple Junction was little more than a bunch of dudes roaming the crowds selling shirts, necklaces, and friendship bracelets at Lollapalooza, Taste of Chicago, Horde, and other places where large groups of hip people would gather.  In 1993, Scott Andersen met Neil and his band of nomadic gypsies at Jazz Fest in New Orleans.  Having just returned from teaching English to schoolchildren in Mexico, Scott was young, eager, and broke.  He joined the Ripple Junction team and we continued to follow the Dead until Jerry Garcia's death in 1995.

      By that time, Ripple Junction had grown into a full-fledged business with actual brick-and-mortar stores.  In fact, much of the '90s were spent just trying to keep the lights on in these stores.  And, to our credit, we only ended up losing power one time.  In 2000 we turned off the lights in our retail stores forever in order to concentrate on what we loved about the business in the first place—creating top-notch graphic T-shirts.

      At the dawn of the new millennium, we turned our focus to licensed entertainment properties, starting with the cult classics—The Lost Boys, The Goonies, Gremlins, and Voltron, among other throwback favorites.  These shirts hit the market just as the first wave of '80s nostalgia broke over America, launching Ripple Junction to a new level of success.

      Today Ripple Junction works regularly with such heavy hitters as Warner Bros., Fox, Universal Studios, Paramount, VIZ Media and Cartoon Network, and we’ve been named to License Magazine's Top 100 Global Licensees list four years running.  Yet, after almost twenty years of success, Ripple Junction's long, strange trip has only just begun.  Thanks for joining us.