Mike Spriggs: I started G+D as a vanity project. I was an IT manager at an investment firm, and I needed a creative outlet, so t-shirts felt like the logical first step. NYC Velo had just opened and the owner, Andrew Crooks, was looking for new t-shirts to carry. I showed him my ideas and he said if I made them he would buy them. I said “Great!… except I don’t know how to make t-shirts” so he graciously offered me the basement of his shop and I taught myself how to silkscreen down there with Ethan from Laekhouse. I made a batch of “I (cog) NY” t-shirts – a riff on the iconic “I (heart) NY” logo except with a single speed cog. And G+D was born.

 

The name was something I had in mind for a long time, it’s based on the TV show Emergency! – the lead characters, Johnny Gage and Roy DeSoto were two names that I always thought sounded great. After I made the NY t-shirt, I put it up on a web page – not a site, mind you– just a single page with a PayPal button. Within three weeks, Bill Strickland from Bicycling magazine somehow found it and wrote about it. He gave it two-thirds of a page of copy, the equivalent size of a like a $20,000 dollar ad and I got flooded with orders immediately.This was late 2009. I kept doing shirts then I started to dabble with kits and hats, but I always had an issue with fronting the money to get them made. I wasn’t prepared for how capital intensive this stuff is. Around this time I met David Trimble from the Red Hook Crit, and he wanted to sell shirts for his race. By this time I had a functioning, actual website, so it made sense to sell Dave’s stuff too since it was so cool. I also met Brett at NYC Velo at the same time and he came on board because we shared a lot of the same ideas on design projects and marketing concepts.

 

The G+D site picked up popularity, and it was right around then that I met Slate Olson from Rapha–at the time he was pitching the idea of a Rapha pop-up store somewhere in Manhattan. I ended up managing that store for Rapha over the summer of 2010. 

 

After that, the Red Hook Crit merchandise was really expanding, so Brett and I moved into an office in Red Hook, Brooklyn with Trimble and handled all the fulfillment for David and the Crit. 

 

Brett Cleaver: I met Mike at NYC Velo. I was sales manager and Mike was helping Andrew with web stuff and doing G+D. We found out pretty quickly that we worked well together, bouncing ideas off of each other. We also began to become more involved in the local cycling scene through our ideas and projects at NYC Velo. I was racing on Rapha’s CRCA squad, so I knew about the upcoming Rapha NYC pop up. I expressed my interest in getting involved. The timeline of the project didn’t work for me, but it did for Mike.
 

 
 

Mike and Brett on the infamous Sriracha hot sauce water bottle:

One day we were in the Red Hook office and Mike had bought some Sriracha at lunch, It was sitting on the table and Brett was looking at it then he says, “That would make a great water bottle. A red bottle with a green cap, the white letters – we could really make this!” Lightbulbs went off. Mike went home and mocked it up that night–it was a very faithful copy. On the Specialized site we uploaded the design. The site creates a 3-D mock up bottle, and it was eerie how much it looked like the original. We talked to a few design bloggers, everyone told us not to tell anyone about it, and that if we did everyone would copy it. It’s a great idea but the barrier for entry is obviously very low. So we kept it under wraps, we were freaking out when they showed up. We put them online. We had never experienced anything really going viral, but it went viral. The Food Network called because they wanted to put them in their Christmas gift guide. It ended up on Reddit, and just kept snowballing from there, but by then ¾ of the bottles were gone. Selectism.com had a big part to do with it going viral, a lot of people picked it up- including of course Huy Fong Foods who sent us a cease and desist letter. We tried to arrange a licensing agreement with Huy Fong, but they were not interested. They didn’t really understand what we were asking. 

 

We still get emails inquiring about them: Where is the hot sauce? Is it ever coming back? We realized what we did wrong was to tell people about it, sure it would have been the right thing to do – had we been selling properly licensed merchandise, but that was a different business model. So we so we did some more but we kept it quiet. We did 400 more and still sold them in 20 minutes, we were selling them to non-cyclists so it became a huge market. We felt like we could have sold 10,000 of them. To top it off, a few months ago Urban Outfitters came out with a cheap knock off Sriracha bottle, presumably with a licensing agreement.