When I was a kid we had a small craft room in our house. I would spend hours and hours in there. I would draw, paint, and create all types of things. I loved it.

As I got older, I stepped away from art as I started to focus on things like school, sports, and spending time with family and friends. Once, I got to college I started to feel like something was missing from my life, but at that time I wasn't sure what that was.

When I joined the football team at the University of Washington, I met someone named Sean Vergara. Outside of school and football I learned that he painted shoes. And they were beautfiul. You can check out his page here. I was captivated by his artisitc ability and at the same time it lit a spark inside me. The image of what I had been missing was starting to take shape.

In highschool, I considered myself a sneakerhead. I loved collecting shoes. I still collect today. And so painting shoes seemed like the perfect crossover of things I loved. It was the perfect way to reignite my childhood love of making art with one of my newer and current passions.

From there, I bought paint and brushes and all the tools I needed to get started and picked out an all black pair of vans from my collection to test on. I love Pokemon and ended up painting scenes from the Tower of Terror episodes from season 1 of the anime. The shoes feature Ghastly, Haunter, and Gengar playing around on one of the shoes, and Sabrina and Kadabra laughing on the other.

From that point on I was hooked. For the first few months I was just painting on my own shoes for my own enjoyment. I was painting anime designs as I loved anime and was watching a lot of it at the time. Things started to change once I started taking an entrepreneurship class. We had an incredible professor who took interests in our lives outside of class. When she learned I painted shoes, she commssioned me for my first paid custom shoe project.

I had so much fun creating for someone else that I decided it was time to look for more potential clinets to take on. I started posting my work online to hopefully get some attention. And it worked! Over the next year, I ended up taking on a few projects. And as I posted more and more shoes, I started to gain a little bit of a following, which led to more commssion requests.

By the time Covid hit I was doing this full time outside of school and football. And being stuck inside during the lockdown just accelerated everything more. I was painting more shoes than ever and was loving every minute of it.

At this point I had decided that I wanted to try to pursue art as my job after grduating college. But, the issue was that I was a slow worker and could not get shoes done as fast as I wanted. I wanted to be able to service more people and I just couldn't at my current pace.

Then I had the idea to try making clothes on the side. I figured if I could do clothes alongside making shoes, then I could service a lot more people with clothes and still continue making shoes!

At the end of 2020, I released my first clothing item: A shirt inspired by Pokemon Crystal. For it being my first product ever, the drop exceeded my expectations and so I decided to keep doing clothes alongside customizing shoes.

I was watching Haikyuu at the time and so i decided to plan my next drop to be inspired by it. I released a t-shirt and hoodie this time, hoping for an even better result than the first drop!

Well, life doesn't always go as you planned. The drop was a failure and I was left wondering if I could really succeed doing clothing.

Over the next few months I kept doing shoes and made another t-shirt design, but it wasn't satisfying me. All I could think about was how I could go beyond t-shirts and hoodies. I wanted to be involved in every step of creating a garment.

At the time I was rewatching Naruto and one day I had this epiphany while watching: "What if I turned his six paths sage mode into a puffer?"

From there I created the design, contacted a manufacturer, and had a sample made. I put it up on my Instagram to see if people were interested and the response was incredible. A few weeks later I made it available... and the rest is history.

I would continue doing shoes for a while, but eventually stopped because I loved making clothes more. I loved being able to create something from scratch and be involved in every step of the process. And most importantly, I loved being able to serve as many people as possible.

Fast forward to today and I am still here. I am so grateful for every single person that supports this brand in any way. I couldn't do any of this without you and I am so greatful for all of you.

The name Zack's Craftroom is inspired by that art room that I grew up in and fostered this creative spirit in me. It is the idea that I want to spend life creating things that bring me joy. And I want to share all of those things with you. Thank you for helping make my childhood dream a reality.