San Diego Takes Control of Style with Collar Free

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We all get sick of the same old stuff. Around here, in the fair city of San Diego, we thrive on the unique, and that, without a doubt, most certainly extends to our fashion sense.

Granted, we are not San Francisco or New York, where the streets are teeming with underground boutiques and shows where one can easily find the latest designs put out by some of the freshest artists.

Yet these days, we do not have to jump on a plane to catch the next trend (or wait for it to finally catch up a couple years down the road); nor do we have to choose something that was put out on the shelf just because a corporation decided it was "cool" and the people at Collar Free would agree.

Collar Free, an online community available to any and all interested, has begun to change the way in which we interact with what we wear by making it possible for the artists and fashion lovers alike to intermix in the same arena and decide what is "in."

Patrick Dillon and Jimmy Hendricks were always ahead of the game, so to speak, and Collar Free is no exception to their innovation and ambition. Back in 2006, the two decided to get together and start Collar Free after reading about a website that allowed freelance designers to create t-shirts to sell on their site. Inspired by the idea of producing a platform where artists could promote their ideas, Dillon and Hendricks took the concept a bit further and decided that consumers should also be a part of the process.

By pairing artists' designs against one another in a fair setting (i.e. only men's apparel against men's and women's apparel against women's) and allocating the consumer to vote on the designs, where only the designs with the most votes get produced, it is the consumer, in the end, who gets the final say in what is manufactured.

"Most companies take 12-24 months to come to market with a new idea," says Dillon of the usual method a corporation might use in discovering what is trendy and what isn't. "Collar Free can do it in ten days. The steps that we skip are all the meetings [between the designer and the company]."

An efficient, well-run organization is not a new insight into the business world for either Dillon or Hendricks, as both have a knack for business and a strong financial sense. Dillon, who holds a double major in Finance and Marketing, started his first company, Cutco Print, through a partnership with Cutco, a company he had worked with for several years. Hendricks, who also worked with Cutco, has his masters in Accounting and Taxation.

Both held jobs with Vector, a distribution of Cutco products and largest recruiter of college students, throughout their college years. Despite the discouraging number of students who generally dropped the job within a few weeks, both Dillon and Hendricks maintained a strong relationship with the company and worked their way up in the corporation through a number of years.

Inspired by the opportunities that Cutco provided to Dillon and Hendricks, both have strived to set up similar business prospects for others through Collar Free. "We pay the designer a royalty," Dillon explains of Collar Free's system of managing the winning designs. "So we give them incentive to not only create great designs, but to help us team up to sell them; a win-win for both the designer and us. This is a recruiting race, just like Cutco was a race for students to sell knives. This is a race to find the best designers."

Not only is Collar Free a chance for artists to advance their ideas, but it is also a mini-partnership for artists and anyone in the community with a good idea or design.

Collar Free pays particular attention to and sympathizes with those trying to avoid the nine to five; especially all those artists out there that are trying to promote their art without sacrificing their passion. The website is a public avenue for designers to get noticed, promote work and possibly get paid for it. Collar Free is continuing to increase artist incentives as well by setting up contests.

For example, one of Collar Free's upcoming challenges will be held in conjunction with the first annual Fashion Week San Diego. The winning designer of this particular competition will have their design produced as the official Fashion Week shirt. The artist's design will also be on display at Fashion Week San Diego for all to see, including some big name designers among the crowd, like Michael Kors.

Individual artists, however important, are not the only focus of Collar Free. "We want the design community to talk to us and we want to talk to them," Dillon says. "We want to see designer happy hour all over, [the way Tyler Durden] had a fight club in every major city." Dillon's "fight club," or designer happy hour, would consist of getting artists together to talk about fashion, logos and any and all things that fit into the world of art and design.

For Dillon, who is only 28 years old, there is much to be added to this already flourishing company, which will possibly include other fashion pieces like hats and shoes. Though this is only the beginning, it seems that Collar Free is off to quite a start. Their Beta site launch, which pulled in 24,000 votes for first week and 96,000 votes in the third week, makes it hard to argue against the success of a consumer designer relationship.

"Why have meetings about what the design is going to be?" Dillon solicits. "Ask the people. This is a Democracy, isn't it?"