On The Road With Jac Vanek

Shortly before the holidays, we had the chance to chat with Jac Vanek, owner of her own line of accessories and clothing at the young age of 23! She's toured with the Vans Warped Tour and Bamboozle, and just recently appeared at Bloomingdales in New York. Jac is the kind of gal who is very easy to talk to and interesting to boot. I could tell from the get-go that I could easily go on a million fun tangents with her and I would need to restrain myself.

It was hard.

My first question, actually, is Jac short for anything? Because I've been dying of curiosity.
Yeah, it's actually short for Jacquelene, and I started going by Jac when I was 15 or 16 when I first started immersing myself in the whole music industry because people could never, never pronounce my name right. It was always like Jacki or Jaclyn or something like that, so I was like, "You know what, I'm going to shorten it to Jac. It'll be easy, and you can't mispronounce it."

Jac Vanek
CREDIT: Claire Oring

So can you tell us a little bit about how you got started?
Yeah. I actually got started with the bracelets. And I started a few years ago while I was still in college. And I basically took $200.00 – that's all the extra money that I had at the time – and I put it into making the first bracelet that I had which is the RUTHLESS bracelet. I probably got 20 of them made. I sent them off to some of my friends in bands and some of my friends that are kind of more well known. And they supported me, and then their friends just started asking about it and fans, and it kind of just slowly expanded from that.