Brand Spotlight: dresscode

FLOURYSH spent 5 minutes with the founder of dresscode, Casey Jostine, about how he’s merging technology and fashion and teaching people about tech all through one emerging brand. 

 

 

Tell us what inspired you to merge tech and fashion. 

So I'm currently a technical product manager and I've been in space for about maybe two to three years now. But I'm also in love with fashion. Like I'm the type to pull up to a team meeting in a floral button up and cool funky dress socks. Or if we're going to a team social I'm coming with my Jordan Ones or my Yeezys. When you think about it, those two attributes usually don’t fit the traditional look of a techie. But I was always brought up with the idea of if you look good, you feel good. But sometimes in these team meetings at these tech conferences and the tech community overall, I felt like I was the only one. African-Americans only make up 6% of the tech workforce. I think fashion runs deep into our culture. And I think Black culture is the piece that the tech community is missing. The goal with dresscode was first merge my two passions, both fashion and tech, but also create some type of clothing that allows us to express ourselves within these tech communities and create that platform that allows us to teach others about technology at the same time. 

Dresscode is positioning itself to inspire the next generation. Tell us how you’re doing that. 

We're planning on doing that through fashion. So for the typical person, you'll see something on a shirt or a concept and think to yourself, oh, that's a cool looking shirt. I wonder what that means. And every piece of clothing that we have, has some type of code or tech concept that allows you to learn. 

Your shirt right here. Tell us how you're doing just that with what you have on. 

This is one of our favorite shirts for the culture. And it's a shirt that we dropped to celebrate Black history month last year. So on the left side you can see the words for the "codeture" which is a play on words with the word culture and code. Because indeed we, Blacks are the culture. Most of our shirts it's a, two-tone where the sleeves are typically a different color from the body. For this design we decided to put the African tribal print to represent Africa. And then on the right side here you'll see the fist in-between a tax. And if you've ever programmed or built some type of page or even customized your homepage back in the MySpace days you should know what these tags mean. It's about building web webpages. So I'm trying to mix those different tech concepts to represent our culture and put it in a unique way to make it fashionable. 

I know that you're thinking about the next five or ten years with technology and with fashion. So as people grow with you what can they expect to see from your brand? 

Yeah. So you can think about it in two ways, right? So in the tech world this web 3.0, this metaverse and NFTS, QR codes and things like that. Each of our shirts have a QR code. Once you scan it with your phone it can bring you to some other place. So on our hoodies, on the sleeve, you'll see a QR code. And that for us presents a lot of opportunities as to what we can actually do with this. So for now, a link takes you to the page just in case folks are asking, Hey, where'd you get that sweater? Hey, where'd you get that? Here's the page. 

This can link us into a different world like the metaverse and other avenues, or if there's a message that I'm truly trying to push to folks I can use or leverage this QR code to do that. And in the world of NFTs and cryptocurrency, there's a lot of opportunities that we can leverage. I love that question because I'm trying to push it forward with fashion, but also make sure we're keeping in the trends with technology. 

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