Today I’m featuring a business that means a lot to me personally, because the person behind it (whether he knows it or not!) was a source of inspiration for me in launching The Sniff. I first connected with CJ through instagram, at a time when I was very unhappy practicing law at a private firm and dreaming of making a huge, scary career change. I reached out to CJ about partnering on a fundraiser, and soon we were chatting about his incredible project: Rescue Strong.
What struck me most about Rescue Strong was its authenticity. Founded in Southern California in 2015, CJ simply wanted to create quality goods that sparked conversation and awareness about animal rescue. Not only has he stayed true to this idea, but he has managed to develop it into a community (thanks in large part to social media) that is saving lives.
I’ll let CJ take it from here….
What inspired you to found Rescue Strong?
When we adopted Luna it inspired me to get active in the rescue community. For my day job I had a run a fundraiser designing a t-shirt and wanted to try it for the rescue we adopted Luna from. It ended up being pretty successful – around $1k raised – and got me thinking about designing for rescues. At the same time I had just started creating art of Luna and had posted it to instagram. I started to create dog art in exchange for donation receipts to rescues and this in turn introduced me to so many amazing rescues and members of the community. This is really what got me started thinking about Rescue Strong.
As the donation commissions started to take off, I started designing and running more fundraisers for rescues. All in all in the first 6 months or so of running donation commissions and tee fundraisers we hit around $25k raised. These fundraisers were still all run through companies like teespring or booster, which were great but didn’t offer some of the products and print options I wanted to do…so I started to look into how to do this myself. I LOVE learning new things, love designing, and love being able to support rescues. Rescue Strong fulfilled all these passions.
How has Rescue Strong evolved since then — what is it today?
Our focus on a product level is apparel, mainly tees and hoodies.
My focus in terms of what we do is to focus on three things – love, community, and rescue. I try to make sure that all our fundraisers and products include these three things.
Love – that it is a positive promotion and doesn’t bring others down to raise ourselves. Community – that it helps or comes from our rescue community. And three – that it helps rescues.
Rescue Strong is not my full-time job and while I LOVE it I also love my career. It has slowly taken up of my free time which is why I’ve recently been looking into getting some local help, but while I do everything I can to make Rescue Strong successful – it is still just a passion project. Like I said above – Rescue Strong has been one GIANT learning experience. From learning about apparel sourcing and printing, how to run an ecommerce shop, how to ship things, and all the stuff in between…it’s meant a lot of late nights, a lot of mistakes, and a lot of “smiling and moving on.”
What is Rescue Strong’s mission?
Our mantra is…
Do something big, or something small. Because whatever you do, it’s better than nothing at all.
This mantra came about because of two experiences. While a majority of my interaction with people in the rescue community has been supportive and welcoming – an early experience with someone who I at the time admired was exactly the opposite. They came to my instagram page and insulted me, told me I wasn’t doing enough, and that I was a terrible person. It came out of left field and I didn’t understand it. I made a promise to myself that no matter how much “success” we were having I would always remember that the rescue community is better when we work together and help others. The other experience was when one of my favorite rescues rescued a dog where it was apparent that too many people had passed and done nothing about (Spirit Golden Heart – Ghetto Rescue Foundation). It was the action of one person that led to another that led to the pup ultimately being saved. It reminded me that everyone plays a part – and that so much of what happens with rescue is because a whole bunch of people decided to do something, rather than one person having to do it all.What do you think keeps people coming back to Rescue Strong?
Rescue Strong is all about giving back – how does it work?
We use at least 50% of our profits to give back. In the beginning we were donating a lot of straight cash from sales but while that is often helpful to rescues in need I got to the point where I thought we could do more. I wanted to start using what I learned from printing and manufacturing to help rescues in a different way. This meant that instead of simply donating $500 in cash we could design, print, and donate $500 worth of tees which the rescues could then sell for around $1250-1400. This was actually one of the original goals with Rescue Strong and why it’s “supply company” because I wanted to supply rescues with donations, product, and knowledge. I’m getting closer to blending all those together.
These are some of the donations/fundraisers we’ve held and the organizations that benefitted. We don’t include smaller cash donations or donation baskets because I’m too lazy to keep up with all that but most of everything we donate is there. Also would like to add that our Director Of Giving Things is Francesca Bunker(@thisisforkeeps on instagram) and none of what we give back would be possible without her help and coordination. She’s amaaaazing!
What does the future hold?
Rescue Strong’s big project is to begin our grant project where we will be helping members of the community launch their own rescue initiatives and covering all their costs so we can get more people involved with no risk to them or the rescues involved.
Be sure to check out Rescue Strong, and follow the project on instagram to become a part of the community. I am a huge supporter of CJ and the work he is doing and I hope you will join me – every penny you spend on these designs goes towards rescuing pets. What’s better than that?
