Today we’d like to introduce you to RJ & Jessica Grunewald.
Hi RJ & Jessica, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
It all started with Taylor Swift.
When Taylor Swift started showing up at football games, our girls started suddenly paying attention to football. And it didn’t take long for them to end up sticking around when the Lions game came on.
Very quickly watching to catch Taylor Swift became cheering on Hutch and Jared Goff and so many other players.
And then our son got involved. He had a nerdier path to football fandom – picking fantasy football teams, video games, and card collecting – but he soon ended up on the couch watching games. And at that point it was a whole family event.
Like any good sports fan, we started dreaming up going to a game, but there was one problem. The cost of getting 5 of us to a Lions game wasn’t an easy expense to budget for. So I threw out the idea, “what if we made shirts.” The idea was pretty straightfoward – our Swiftie loving, Lions fans wanted gear that highlighted their love of both, and so I mocked up an idea and gave them a goal. If they could sell 100 shirts, we’d buy tickets.
While most kids end up selling pizza kits or magazines for school, our homeschool family ended up experimenting with entrepreneurship. We started designing. Filming content. Testing out samples. Making elevator pitches. Budgeting. Business meetings became a weekly part of our homeschool rhythms – all with the goal, sell enough to go to a Lions’ game.
Either way, I knew it would be a good lesson. If we hit the goal, they’d never forget the work it took to get to that point. They’d learn about business and hard work and trying to sell to people who didn’t know us. And if it failed, well that’s a success too – they’d learn about dreaming big, missing a goal, and re-adjusting.
Right around December of that year (2024), we hit our 100th sale and we’ll never forget the moment we walked into Ford Field not just telling the kids that mom and dad got them there, but reminding them that they got us there. They pitched their business to family. They hung flyers in snow storms. They reached out to anyone who would listen, and they did it. 100 sales and we got to go to the game of a lifetime with a primetime game against the Minnesota Vikings for the 1 seed.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
There’ve been a ton of ups and downs. It is especially challenging with the kids following up a record-setting month with a month that falls way below our goals – even some months early on having no sales at all. It’s been in those months where we needed to teach ourselves and our family how to run a lean business and budget well while still creating and dreaming for what is ahead.
We’ve been impressed with Co x Lab, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We make Detroit sports apparel for the whole family.
We don’t just run the business ourselves, we do the whole thing as a family. Our kids are a part of every step of the journey. Our oldest, Eli, has weekly responsibilities doing graphic design, including some awesome hand-drawn Detroit sports designs. Emmy, our middle child, is dreaming up what it will look like to be able to sew and add some special handmade touches to our designs. Alice, our youngest, is our dreamer. She is always dreaming, sketching, and brainstorming new designs and has made some of our most popular designs to date.
As parents (Jess and RJ), we are helping the kids discover their gifts and know what it’s like to start a business. We want our kids to one day believe that if they have an idea that they could make it reality. It’s not really about the shirts, it’s about the memories and the lessons we learn along the way.
And we just happen to believe that by sharing the memories we are making as we run this business, we might also find some other families that want to wear our shirts while making some memories of their own.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
The kids really own this business, too. It would be easy to assume that we (Jess and RJ) do all the work and just occasionally bring the kids along on the journey but that’s not the case. We don’t really make any of the money yet. We give some of it to Eli as we coach him in having his first design job, paying him and guiding him in learning what it’s like to have design responsibilities. When Alice dreams up a design, we help her bring it to life. And it’s actually her idea. We will coach her and guide her, we will give her some design assets to bring into her iPad mockups, but it’s really her vision and her dreams and she gets real say in her creations. Emmy decided she wanted to learn to sew not long after our family got invited to sell shirts at the Detroit Autoshow in January. We just happened to be next to an amazing woman (Ashley Harris Design) making super cool upcycled fashion, and Emmy decided she wanted to try to learn how to eventually find things herself at a thrift store and upcycle them herself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.thisiscolab.org
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/thisiscolab
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thisiscolab.org
- Other: https://tiktok.com/@thisiscolab
