Many many years ago I walked into a large grocery store to purchase a few small items for me and my lovely wife to snack on before retiring to bed after a long day. As I was about to leave, the cashier said to me, “Thanks Richard, have a safe drive home” To my astonishment, I turned and thanked her but questioned her on how she knew my name. She smiled and replied, “Oh it was easy, I read it off the sticky note you have on your shirt.  To my embarrassment, we had just gotten out of a convention of types where we were all given a name tag to stick on our shirts to identify us and I had failed to remove mine after the meeting. From that day to this, I have always thought about how we identify with one another daily. From that experience, it was easy to come up with our company name (Identity Getup) when we began this business two years ago.

Having spent over 40 years in the seat of a crane, I traveled all over the western U.S. from erecting steel buildings to unloading ships and everything in between. In those years one of the interesting things I noticed with people and businesses alike, was identity was a valuable commodity. Vehicles had company signs; equipment had their own identity signs. Every construction company I met identified their own employees with hats and shirts and coveralls etc., Needles to say, it was an easy task for my lovely wife and I to choose a retirement gig, if you will, to spend our golden years with doing. We started working out of our home and had plenty of room because the kids were all gone starting their own families. We started customizing all kinds of apparel and had a few real easy clients to start with. Our desire was never to expand to a large business, and it was special to us because we could put our own personal care in the things we made without any hurry or pressure to meet deadlines. Our happy customers have now turned into them wanting to share our products with others and demanding jokingly that we need a website. We are starting to outgrow our home business and that’s just fine as we have plenty of grand kids that are willing to jump in and help, but no matter what I will inspect every piece that is made from our machines personally because my wife and my name has always been an important part of our identity.