An innovative dress shirt company from a man



When he was 13 and living with his family in Hong Kong the following thought occurred to Ben Perkins: Why, he wondered, could he play a 90-minute soccer match and feel perfectly comfortable in the athletic jersey he was wearing, and yet, when he put on a dress shirt and sat in an hourlong air-conditioned church meeting, he felt like a stuck pig?To get more news about Towelling Hoody, you can visit harmonshop.com official website.

Then came his epiphany: Hey, why not make a dress shirt out of the same stuff as my soccer jersey?China was where Nike, Adidas and other makers of the relatively new and revolutionary breathable synthetic athletic jerseys, with names like Dri-FIT and ClimaLite, were sourcing their material. Also, it was right next door.
“My allowance didn’t cover making 5,000 dress shirts,” remembers Ben. Wicka-Sweat was out of business before it had a chance to begin.

Fast forward six years later, when Ben, who had gotten so good at soccer that the University of Kentucky gave him an athletic scholarship, decided after his freshman year to interrupt his schooling to go on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Wearing the standard missionary uniform of tie and dress shirt, he silently suffered for two years. When he returned home and dumped his dingy, frayed cotton shirts in the dumpster, he decided the time was right to revive his old Wicka-Sweat idea.

Maybe his time had passed, but “I figured there were a lot of missionaries going out that could totally benefit from an athletic dress shirt,” he says.

By now he had transferred to Utah Valley University, where he’d also been given a soccer scholarship. Selling his new line of dress shirts was something he’d do on the side.

He raised enough money via Kickstarter to invest $20,000 in his new business, almost all of it going for product. The bedroom in his Provo apartment was stacked to the ceiling with dress shirts. He marketed them online and through word of mouth. They went out the door very slowly, in ones and twos.But then, somehow, a missionary mom in Ogden heard about these shirts suitable for the tropics and said she needed 10 of them for her son who was leaving for Barranquilla, Colombia, in two days.

Before he knew it, his shirts were all the rage among the Barranquilla missionaries, who started ordering them en masse. Word was out: These shirts were cool.

The positive feedback caused him to think maybe his part-time business could become his full-time business. When he graduated from UVU in 2018 he and his friend and marketing director, Jordan Larsen, decided they’d give it a try.

Their goal: To make the world’s most comfortable dress shirt — breathable, stretchy, wrinkle-free, stain-free, doesn’t come untucked, wicks away sweat — and with an added humanitarian twist. Since the material is all man-made and synthetic, they decided they would use only recycled plastic.“You read every day about all the plastic in the ocean and landfills and even on streets as litter,” explains Ben. “We thought, ‘OK, we have enough plastic; let’s use plastic that already exists.’ We have to pay more for recycled plastic, but we’re trying to be stewards not only of men’s wardrobes but also of the Earth.