ABOUT US

Some may ask, Why Krunch Crew? And to that we say, Why not?

KRUNCH is the culmination of too many outrageous, fun, and slightly ridiculous ideas refusing to stay imaginary.

Art (from local artists and creatives — shoutout to our friend and tattoo wizard Michael Ricali), stir in tech, music, quirk, color, a dash of crypto, heavy helpings of hip-hop, punk, and soul then krunch it all together.

What you’re left with isn’t one thing. It’s the sum of the pieces.

(dramatic pause)

We like LOUD.
Patterns that whisper (Are those seahorses?) until they don’t with colors that shout (Are those pink seahorses?)!

Ok, if that gave you even a half-smirk or left you wondering, good. You’re in the right place. Onwards!

TLDR; the following ends up being one long paragraph and I wouldn't disagree that the use of breaks and paragraphs could have been better. If you'd rather not read this poignant origin story, you can skip ahead to read about what KRUNCH does and OAKS.

Where it all began

It all started with a verse from a hip-hop song - "Gucci Chuck Taylor's with the dragon on the side..." Hearing that verse led to the idea of making my own sneakers. Yeah, make my own, personal, One-of-A-Kind Sneakers! That should be easy enough to do. Right? Well that idea blossomed into the idea of using tattoo art which is personal and unique in order to make the sneaker design unique and one-of-a-kind, you know, just like my own tattoos are personal and unique and now that same art would make my kicks personal and unique and that is what led us to Mike. Mike is a good friend of one of the KRUNCH founders and he had all of these really cool tattoo art designs that fit perfectly into what I was looking to do for my One-of-A-Kind Sneakers, just gonna call them OAKS from here on out. So now we just needed to figure out how to get these designs over to some sneakers like Chuck's. Alright, so what are our options to make our first pair of OAKS, well... wait a second, first let's take a step back. We have the idea about the OAKS and the tattoo art, and the artist friend with the really cool tattoo designs and art. The more we talked about it we realized how much we also want to do something for Mike, for the artists, something that was cool for the artists too. Well that turned into ideas of how to accredit the artist, and show ownership of the digital by the artist and of the physical by the fan, and of how to show authenticity of the work and all of which then led to the no-brainer of an idea of making a simple web shop where we could help promote Mike's art by connecting fans of his art to his own original, custom-designed sneakers... oh, and that very quickly led to also include other gear and merchandise. So as you can hear there were and are so many great ideas that were coming out of all of this exploring and that brings us back to the present, which, I did not forget to mention, is going to be a long story and before we start that again, we have to go back to where we stopped and... Alright, so what are our options to make our first pair of OAKS, well... (let's keep this short) We started looking at how to print on sneakers and the different methods to do so - DTG, DTF, sublimation, DIY, etc. etc. Lots more ideas, lots more learnings. Great! So, yeah, we can do this and we got options, but where to start? There was a lot of "More, more, more" and on that note, let's talk a little tech now. We are techies (I mentioned that earlier) so, of course, we mostly wanted to build something ourselves. An easy way to turn your art into custom gear and sneakers and sell it. We knew there were lots of options out there to make a web shop fairly easily and for a fairly reasonable price. So we decided to start there and look at those first. Yeah, okay, if you made it this far then you probably already know where I am going with this. These options are great, but... Our biggest and most surprising learning, however, was that this was not easy. Not as easy as we thought anyway, and imho, it was actually kinda difficult. What we thought was a simple idea of making a custom design sneaker just openend up a Pandora's box of challenges. If every curious fan or artist had to go through all of this just to try to get a custom piece of gear made for selling online then well, good luck! BUT, do not lose hope! More good ideas, more learnings, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more and you get the idea. In all of the "more", we found a great partner which had the high quality products and the print methods that we were looking for to make our custom gear and One-of-A-Kind Sneakers! Win, win! Fast forward to present day and back to our original DIY/BYOS (Do-it-yourself/Build-your-own-site) strategy and making it super easy for artists to get started creating and selling their gear online too. Our idea is to go that extra mile to make it easy. It's early days, but our Mission is clear, our Tech is growing, our Ideas are becoming reality, and we are thrilled to deliver high quality, custom design products straight to your door.