I started this clothing brand in 2020 during the COVID-19 quarantine. I was bored at home and felt that I needed a creative outlet, so I made my own. I made designs on my computer using the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, starting with basic designs and transitioning into more complex orders. My first ever release was a white cotton shirt that had a front print on the left chest and a full back print. I eventually made my way into making designs that were embroidered onto the clothing and began to experiment with blanks that weren't just t-shirts and hoodies. I still work on and run this brand currently, and it has become more of a passion project for me.
This was the first t-shirt I made for the brand, since the name is The Big Yawn, I wanted to make sure that idea was represented with the first product. I wanted to emphasize that I was mainly making comfort wear at the time. I purchased this through an American supplier, it was either Apliiq or Broken Arrow.
This was the first crewneck that I made. It was made on a Gildan blank, and I kept it pretty simple by digitizing a doodle I had drawn and putting that on the front of the crew. This is one of my favorites from the earlier collections.
I feel that I took a big leap in terms of product quality with this release from the summer of 2021. The cream colored shirt on the right had a two-color embroidered design in the middle of the shirt that was TBY shaped like a heart. The quality of the shirts I was buying at the time had also increased significantly. The shirt on the right was the same blank as the left, but with a DTG-printed design. This was honestly not my best work and was a poor attempt at a knock-off of the DREW brand.
This release was also the first one where I had a friend help me with a photoshoot. My friend Nanda was pretty good with cameras and offered to shoot this for me, and even color-graded them afterwards. I got my friends Rami and Meghan to help as models.
The next drop was another big step for me as I decided to experiment with printing methods and the type of clothing I was making. I bulk ordered some blank forest green sweatpants (Gildan again) and bought some transfer prints from Transfer Express. I used a heat press that my sister's boyfriend at the time had let me borrow to add the patches to the pants. This was a well-received item from my friends and those who bought it, and I think the difference in patch style and layout made it a standout piece. This item was released in October of 2021.
I once again got my friend Nanda to help take pictures, and I got my friend Kris to help with modeling.
The next drop that I did was in January of 2022. I made a crewneck and a t-shirt that were released together and had a conjoined photoshoot. Print quality continued to get better, and blank quality was about as good as it was for the TBY heart release. I wanted to make a university crewneck for the fake Yawning University. I made a crest and printed the entire design on the front of the crewneck, and since it was only one color, I was able to do a screen print for this. For the t-shirt, I wanted to make it more playful to counter the corporate feel of the first item, so I digitized a doodle of a bird that I had done, and DTG printed it on the t-shirt. The t-shirt was also a popular item, and a few friends from home still talk about it to this day.
I once again got Nanda to help me take pictures for this, and was able to get my friends Claudia, Mira, Lauren, and Emily to help as models.
This next drop came in three drops, from March 2022 to August 2024. The first drop was a western-themed hoodie for no other reason than experimentation. I had made a minimalist collage of a desert that I really loved, and decided to make that the back design for the hoodie. I ordered the hoodies from Apliiq and only got the back design printed DTG. Once they came in, I ordered more transfer prints from Transfer Express for the front TBY lettering. I used the heat press to put them onto the hoodie, and they were ready to go. I was able to cut costs by doing this instead of getting the whole design from Apliiq.
Nanda took these photos, and Kris and Noah helped with modeling.
The second drop is coming in July of 2022. I wanted to make some "essential" type sports wear, and landed on making some board shorts/running shorts. I chose blue and salmon because I felt the two colors paired well together and were versatile with outfit selection on their own. I ordered the blanks for the shorts from Alibaba, which I had recently discovered. The use of Alibaba was something I kept using moving forward.
The third and final drop coming in August 2022 was a t-shirt in 3 color options. I had found some success with the digitized doodle designs, and figured I would give it another try with this flower doodle. It came in the summer and was fitting with that time of the year. DTG print on a cotton t-shirt.
This was the first shoot I did without Nanda. I did this one myself and just used my phone camera and some of the night mode features it had. I was able to get my friends Audrey and Meghan to model for the shoot for me.
This was also the last drop that I did for the brand before I went to college. I had much less time and less funds than I did in high school; it has become more of an annual drop just because I want to prove to myself that I can keep doing this even this many years later.
I want to note that I came up with the idea and essential design of these boxers in December 2022, but I didn't end up actually making them until September 2025.
The next item I dropped was this embroidered t-shirt in July 2023. I wanted to come back with another sort of essentials, a minimal piece that could hold its own as a nice daily shirt. I wanted it to be comfortable and a bit oversized. I ordered the entire embroidery and blank from an Alibaba supplier. This shirt was well-received, and I ended up estimating pretty well on quantity per size.
I photographed for this shoot with my phone. I got my friends Alex, Rami, and Noah to help model for me. This was done at Alex's house, which I honestly found to have a lot of really nice walls to photograph in front of.
I followed with another drop in August 2023. I wanted to make more "essentials" type shorts in a different color-way, so that is exactly what I did. I didn't want to repeat colors, but I got some positive feedback about the blue shorts. These shorts were from a different supplier, and were a different texture, a softer feeling than a rigid plastic poly feel. I used the same logo patch that I used for the first ones, which was another heat transfer patch, and the transfer paper can be found behind the shorts in the right-most picture. I would cut one of those out, line it up on the shorts, and use the heat press to seal it onto the shorts.
I took the photos for this shoot, and I was able to get my friends Rami and Kris to help model for me.
My next drop was in July 2024. I had generated this grid of images of youth yawning. This was something that I had generated using one of the very early AI image generators. I will admit I did very little to the image itself after the fact, but this image had been sitting on my laptop since my freshman year of college. I went with this distorted theme for my rollout for this drop and thought the shirt was a great centerpiece for that. This was also the first time I made custom tags for my shirts. This was ordered from Alibaba and was a DTG print.
I took the photos for this shoot. I was also the model for this shoot, since I was really struggling to find anyone who was available to model, and I was really eager to drop this shirt. I think the dark lighting of the images themselves matches the aesthetic the shirt is trying to accomplish and adds to the ambiguity of the meaning of the grid of distorted faces.
The next and most recent drop I have done was the boxers that I mentioned earlier. I made some tweaks to the pattern that I was using for the print, but they came out almost exactly how I was expecting them to. I had made my own size guide that the manufacturer used to make the pattern for the boxers, and basically made them from scratch. The measurements weren't all perfect, but I have a pair of my own, and they are very comfortable.
My friend Brennan was able to take the photos for this shoot. I was able to get my friend Kris (different Kris) to help model with me for this. This is by far my favorite product and photoshoot that I have done with the brand. The photoshoot was done in the driveway of the house next to my apartment here at school.
I plan to continue working and producing things for this brand as it has turned into a pet project for me. I plan to continue pushing what I can print on and what a print/design can look like. I am very grateful to have had the drive and desire to do something like this. With every drop, I learn more about design, manufacturer workflow, and general sales and business skills on the selling end. I generally break even with my profits because it has always been a creative outlet of mine that I make available for those who are interested in supporting the work. I am very grateful for everyone who has bought something to support this brand, and feel that I have made customers for life through this.