Shirt Happens
Mountain Biking, Making People Laugh, and Real Estate Agents are Annoying AF
So what am I doing here? What are you doing here?
I started the Matt Moves Mountains namesake with the original intent of selling real estate and taking a portion of the sale to donate to the New England Mountain Bike Association, of which I'm a member.
Two problems with that:
1) Nice idea, but it didn't have enough reach or potential impact.
2) Turns out real estate agents annoyed the shit out of me.
Real Estate was a "shadow career" for me anyhow. You know, when you veer off the 9 to 5 path, but in a somewhat responsible way, so you can justify to yourself attempting to try it in the first place? Yeah, that.
What I've always loved is being creative, making people laugh, and having a positive impact on people. What I've loved for the last 20 years or so is mountain biking.
(Like, I actually love these things.)
But I'm no Picasso with a brush, I'm no Danny MacAskill with a bike, and I'm no Seinfield either. Well isn't that a logistical problem...
I've had a long-running, half-assed plan to make funny t-shirts (Uh, yes Alex, I'll take "Entrepreneurial Cliches" for a thousand..), but I never had any real direction or ways to apply the idea. More recently, I've been coming up with trail-forged, mountain bike themed one-liners that I've been keeping in a word document. Still, no real purpose - I just thought they were funny.
One such one-liner:
Plant a Padded Tree..
Save a Mountain Biker
...resonated with me as an idea that may just be more than a shirt. It had a message behind the goofy notion of trying to grow trees with pads on them. It was acknowledging a simple bond in the mountain biking community: the fact that we all know we're going to crash from time to time, and then we all do what we can to help fallen riders back up.
This timing coincided with the 2015 Red Bull Rampage, an event where every second that someone doesn't crash seems a mini-miracle to most anyone watching .. maybe even to the riders. True to form, this year's Rampage saw several epic crashes, most of which the riders were able to walk away or at least bounce back from. Others were not so fortunate. Paul Basagoitia sustained a spinal injury that's had him in physical therapy ever since, trying to recover. You can read more about that and his recovery fund here.
Suddenly there was some direction and purpose.
I decided to put my theory to the test, and start selling "Plant a Padded Tree" to raise money specifically for Paul Bas' recovery fund. With any success, I plan to continue to turn my ideas into shirts - each of which will help fundraise for injured riders and other worthy mountain biking causes.
So here's my sincere hope:
I hope that we can plant a whole forest of these padded trees - metaphorically speaking - and that we'll make a serious positive impact on Paul's recovery.
And I hope to repeat that process for as long as mountain bikers keep wearing shirts. (Ahem - lookin' at you, Cam McCaul...)
While I finalize such minor details as 'actually being a company', you can follow me on whatever social media makes you feel the most social. Here's what you get:
Homemade MTB memes made with the finest ingredients. And mediocre pictures of my mediocre riding... with top-notch captioning! Updates on new shirt designs.
Capitalize on my time spent on the internet and scroll through my curation of great mountain bike content. Sometimes I even get deep on Facebook.
A platform with a 140 character limit and a guy who loves one-liners? Why didn't I invent Twitter?
Snapchat (mattmovesmtns):
How do I even explain this one? Basically, I doodle stuff like this when I'm supposed to be working on my day job...
As I sit here writing this a couple days before Christmas - at my previously mentioned 9 to 5 - I have an excitement that not even the gray cubicle walls can stop. I'm at the trailhead of something awesome, and hopefully you'll join me for the ride.
Happy Holidays!
Matt
