East Fork x Drip Life

Tony Pearson, a member of East Fork’s roller team, is an artist who started a line called Drip Life last year. After making hundreds of custom shirt designs, he made two for East Fork that we’re offering for sale in limited quantities.

Tony Pearson works on the Roller Tool Team at East Fork but when he's off the clock he's making music, writing poetry, and designing graphics for head-to-toe apparel. About a year ago and a half ago, Tony started talking to me about an idea he'd been carrying around with him that was growing bigger and wilder every day—a concept he started to call Drip Life, which harmonized his love for design, fashion, music, attitude, and the place Tony calls home.

One day Tony showed up with an armful of t-shirts for his co-workers in vibrant, ecstatic designs. Soon enough, Tony started bringing together images of his co-workers and their pot-making process into the Drip Life aesthetic and within 6 months pretty much the entire East Fork staff at headquarters was the proud owner of a custom Drip Life x East Fork t-shirt.

Today we're proud to showcase and release two t-shirts designed by Tony Pearson, accompanied by a video directed by Jefferson Ellison of @jawbreaking. Jefferson has this to say about the project:

"When the East Fork team brought me onto this project, I thought it was going to be pretty straightforward. A brand (East Fork) collaborates with an artist (Tony Pearson); here is the story, here are the details. But by the end, I had discovered that this was not just a conversation about a business championing its staff. It's not even just a brand collaboration. This was a story about the power of shared passion, access, and visibility.

Tony has made his mark at East Fork by being vulnerable, accepting, inviting, warm, passionate, empathetic, humble, and most of all authentic. At his place of work, Tony found a community that loved Design as much as he did. People who, too, believed that music can change a mood or that the day's palette of colors can change its very outcome. And through him, East Fork has found its ability to become the cheerleader, mentor, and collaborator rather than just the boss.

If you've ever wondered what it would look like, if capitalism became compassionate or employees became people rather than positions, I believe this partnership is where we start. And while I'm not sure if the Drip Life x East Fork will answer all the questions, I think it's definitely put the problem on the page."