“Spread love, it’s the Nashville way” certainly has a pleasant ring to it and over the past three years, one local company has coined, printed, and advanced the mantra to become Nashville’s zen koan. Project615 has gone from a small t-shirt printing outfit to a nationally recognized Nashville clothier. We were able to sit down with Kristen Pellegrino, Project615’s own “Director of Happiness” to talk Preds, worthwhile endeavors, catfish, and major league soccer’s future in Music City.
HH: During the Stanley Cup finals, I couldn’t look left without seeing one of your shirts—how did that feel to be so interwoven into one of the more exciting times here in town?
KP: Anytime we see our shirts around town, it’s such an exciting feeling! But being the huge Preds fans we are, there’s nothing like seeing our town rocking their navy & gold tees! Like you said, any direction we looked, there was a Catfish or Fang Fingers tee. We loved watching the entire community come together to cheer on the Preds!
HH: For those who may not know, can you explain the way your products benefit the community? How has that idea of Project615 grown along with the popularity of the product itself.
KP: We are a company focused on serving others by selling high quality apparel that advocates for world-changing causes. Since the company started back in 2010, we’ve been able to hire 50 people who are on the path of recovery from addiction, homelessness, & mental illness. In addition to that, we decided we wanted to help impact other world changing organizations. So we release special edition t-shirts throughout the year where 100% of the profit from every tee sold is donated to those respective organizations. Those campaigns have been my absolute favorite projects to be a part of. Thanks to the support of our amazing customers & partners, we’ve been able to give nearly $350,000 to some incredible non-profits!
HH: Who is actually drawing the cartoon catfish for the shirts? This guy needs his own comic strip. Has anything like that come from any of the shirt designs or do they begin and end with cotton?
KP: Right?! The mastermind behind our catfish design is our co-owner, Matt Blinco. He’s inspired by a lot of different styles, so the Catfish design was a mash up of about 5-10 different fish logos he’d personally seen on vintage hockey apparel. I’ll be sure to add comic strips to our goals for 2019!
HH: I’m sure you’re excited as we are for the MLS arrival, what kind of stuff will you be rolling out for the inaugural season?
KP: We are all SO excited about the MLS announcement. We have a lot of soccer players & fans in the office (we play an unhealthy amount of foosball here), so we are definitely looking forward to designing and releasing some new apparel for the inaugural season. Lots of gold & navy tees over here!
HH: What else is in store for Project615 in 2018? Any collaborations or side projects you’re particularly excited about?
KP: 2018 is going to be a fun year for us! We all came back from the Holiday break excited to plan out the year & ready to give back to the community some more. We’ve started gearing up for our 4th Annual Nash Spring Bash event, which will take place at Public Square Park on April 29th! This event is always a great time & we look forward to it every year. We also have some exciting new partnerships & campaigns planned with a few of our favorite music & sports influencers. Keep an eye on our socials for those announcements! 😉
We’re quite partial to Kristen and the gang as they helped develop part of our uniform. We loved a design we used during our renovation so much that we chose to make it a permanent fixture and outfit our front desk team members in it.
Visit project615.org to shop their entire collection.