Turning a viral TikTok series into a hoodie brand

Dumbclub started as a man-on-the-street trivia series. Rylan Montoya walked up to strangers, asked them questions, and handed out prizes when they got one right. The bit built a community, and the community became a brand: apparel for the people who liked being in on it. By the time I came in, that audience was in the millions.

Rylan Montoya and his COO, Ari Savitsky, had the audience and a genuinely good product: a hoodie built to be the most comfortable one you could buy. What they didn't have was a brand that could carry it into a real, scaling Shopify business.

Two questions sat underneath that. First, what does "Dumbclub" stand for once it's a product and not just a bit? There was a duck character on their most popular hoodie, and no one could quite tell why. Second, the brand grew out of fun, juvenile internet humor, and it had to stay fun without tipping into childish. The customer was a young adult. The brand now had to earn their money, not just their laughs.

I started by pinning down what the brand was allowed to mean. Fun, yes. Community, yes. But built for someone in their twenties, not a kid.

That set the visual direction. I drew the characters in a sticker style, each one ringed by a die-cut border. The reference was a university library: a table of open MacBooks, every lid layered in stickers over the Apple logo. It reads young and a little chaotic, but it's the taste of someone who chooses what goes on their laptop. Grown-up, not elementary.

Then the product's promise. They'd built "the world's comfiest hoodie," and comfort is hard to draw. I looked for a metaphor that could represent it, and we decided on clouds. Clouds ran through the textures, the visuals, and the mailer that showed up on the customer's doorstep, so the feel of the product arrived before the box was even open.

From there I built the system: the logo and wordmark, a full visual identity, custom poly mailers, a Shopify site designed to hold up as the store scaled, social templates, and brand guidelines to keep it consistent.

Across three and a half years, Dumbclub has done $1.2M+ in ecommerce sales and shipped more than 20,000 orders, on the back of 1.5 billion views across TikTok, YouTube, and social. This is still their brand today.