This has got to be one of the most heartwarming interviews I've done this year! Just in time to get me in the holiday spirit, I sat down to talk with Nick Martin, co-founder of the new clothing line Lost & Loveless, and guitarist for the band D.R.U.G.S. We spoke about teddy bears, the impact of positive change, Long Duk Dong, and of course, we had to throw some music in there, too.Hi Nick! How are you doing today?
I'm doing really good. How's your day going?
Pretty good. So tell me how Lost & Loveless got started.
Well, I had a clothing company maybe three, four years ago that I started, and at the time realized I didn't have the time to put into it. So I kind of took a couple year break on it and I realized I did miss it and I wanted to get back into, hopefully, doing something with clothing again. And a good friend approached me and said he was starting a company so it kind of just spawned off from that. I kind of wanted to gear towards, you know, keeping what we're doing really positive and also having a charitable aspect to it. With the previous clothing line that I had at the time I was raising money for a little fire relief fund here in San Diego when there were all those... we had a ton of fires one summer. And I started a clothing company solely based on just raising money to help families kind of rebuild and restructure their lives. So I wanted to take that same kind of approach and mentality with Lost & Loveless this time around. We're not solely focused on just one charitable organization, we kind of want to have a broad spectrum of trying to, you know, raise awareness or help raise money for various charities so that's what the company is kind of founded on.
That's very inspirational. I know you just ran a Toys for Tots campaign in October. Do you have any immediate plans for more fundraisers?
Um yeah. You know... we have a million ideas and it's just a matter of trying to hone in on what the best ideas are and what the most feasible ideas are. Like I said, we want to keep a broad spectrum of different charities and different organizations that we want to help, but I kind of feel like it's gearing towards more helping kids as much as possible. I know for me personally I've got such a soft spot for kids; you know wanting kids to have an amazing life growing up and anything I can do to help to facilitate kids being able to achieve whatever they want. And I think a lot of our charities are really going to be geared towards kids. We want to get into the kids clothing world if we could and make shirts for kids and tie a charitable aspect toward that of you know, if a child wears one of our shirts then we'll donate another shirt to a child, and kind of instill [doing] charitable acts with kids at a young age. If they feel like they're making a change instead of just adults doing it, I want kids to feel like they're also doing something positive for the world. That's kind of the future of what we want to do charity-wise. And we want to make bears at some point next year, and do the same thing where if you buy a bear, another bear gets donated to a kid in need. So there's a million ideas of where we want to go with the charity aspect but I think it's going to be geared more towards helping like disadvantaged youth, I guess.
