Letter from Pirate
Hi all,
Checking in as we’ve already completed a third of the year, we want to share an update on where the art project that is Pirate stands today.
We’re only able to get to where we are because of all of your constant support over the last six-plus years. We’re proud of the growth over this time, which has been intentionally slow and meaningful.
Pirate isn’t your typical brand. Pirate was founded by a group of childhood friends who have known each other since as far back as elementary school. Duking it out in athletics and the classroom through high school, we went our separate ways to experience real life and university in the early 2010s: participating at a high level in athletics, traveling the world, producing and making music, selling cell phones and life insurance, documenting world tours with your favorite rappers, living in different parts of the world, and pirating Adobe to teach ourselves design. We were a group of friends who would come back for holidays and post-university graduations to do nothing else but create with each other in all different mediums of music, film, and product design. All self-taught.
Pirate was an intentional accident in a sense. The art project from high school that never ended, that only got better and better with each project we’d self-initiate because there was nothing else we wanted to do but create to express ourselves. A lot of that mentality came from our athletic mindsets growing up and embedding that into our creative lives once the cleats and hoop shoes got hung up. Practice, practice, and more practice. Throw all ideas at the wall and see what sticks.
Each one of us had our own unique superpower and brought it back to better the collective. Design, product creation, sound production, writing, cinematography, styling, art, storytelling, etc. We always joke internally that Pirate is like a version of the Avengers or Wu-Tang, in that everyone brings their own skill set, perspective, style, and sense of aesthetics.
The brand has grown, and we intend for it to continue to do so exponentially every year for as long as it is on our own terms. The beautiful thing is that because Pirate is a fully independent brand, with no outside backing, we answer to no one but ourselves and you, the real investors in Pirate.
When we design in the Cannoli Studio, we design for us first and foremost. We are the muse, and we believe those who have supported and participated in wearing Pirate are also the muse. The modern Athlete-Creative. A person who moves through sport, travel, museums, music, and city life with taste, discipline, and cultural awareness.
Pirate, the essential Art House for the Athlete-Creative. The reason we refer to ourselves in that manner is because everything we create is to be respected and treated as art. The purpose of Pirate is to design beautiful product while telling meaningful stories. Our concentration is on product first, always, and each product is developed to integrate seamlessly into your wardrobe. This is a never-ending journey of designing for timeless elegance.
We aren’t a fashion brand or a one-dimensional design studio. We are a multidisciplinary art house that is self-funded via the art we put out in the world and the stories we tell. Artist meets art dealer. Art dealer is artist, and artist is art dealer. That’s been the business model since day one, in true Nipsey form, to cut out the middleman.
Because every penny we make goes back into Pirate, we are working to continue to deliver creative, unique art and design that you can only get from Pirate. We aim to release something new weekly, which doesn’t always happen due to a number of reasons. We aim to continue to innovate and develop product that is both on-brand and unexpected. We intend to continue to do less, but better. In a fast-paced, short-attention-span world, everyone’s advice to us from the outside looking in is to post more content, make more 15-second reels, and make more TikToks. It just never felt aligned with who we are and what our purpose is.
As a very small team, where everyone wears multiple hats and is focused on ensuring that your experience with the brand is of the highest quality from front to back, beginning to end. We are magnifying-glass focused on bettering everything centered around our product and creative storytelling abilities. We are doing everything in our ability to empower the Pirate brand until the wheels fall off, or the ship sinks (probably more on-brand?).
This is long-winded and probably for good reason. If you’re reading this far, you are who we truly do this for. Pirate. We will continue to improve our product and design, be more creative, and tell longer-form stories. Everything that’s designed and created to last is what we want to be involved in.
As the brand and business continue to grow, we are all in on elevating the Pirate systems and following our principles that allow us to operate in a way that fully controls the process of design, production, and distribution. We will continue to approach every design with the intent that it will one day live in a museum.
All of this to say, thank you. Thank you for all of the constant love and support. Thank you for being a part of this journey thus far. We are beyond grateful for the growth we’ve experienced and don’t take any of this for granted. We will continue to work on becoming better in every aspect of the brand. We understand there are a million other brands that you could be supporting, so for us to be one of them is something we do not take lightly at all.
Back to the work.
- PIRATE