Aspiring to “Never Worried, Never Hurried” - Interview with Commercial Artist, Brand Designer, and Chomp founder, Joshua Ariza
This week’s interview is with Joshua Ariza, a commercial artist, brand designer, and the founder of Chomp, an apparel brand known for its unique mix of illustration, art, and an incredibly fun and irreverent ethos.
After beginning his career as a graphic designer at brands including Billabong and Nike, Joshua made the decision to go out on his own as a freelancer in 2013. He describes those early years as doing whatever networking he could to get the “snowball headed downhill.” In 2015, he started Chomp in response to what he felt was a climate of very serious brands; he wanted to create something that didn’t take itself too seriously and was infused with a strong sense of fun and humor. There was clearly an audience that wanted the same thing. 10 years later, Chomp has sold over 2 million individual items; a number even Joshua struggles to believe. In addition, he has continued to grow his freelance business and worked on a variety of incredibly cool projects as a designer and illustrator such as custom Star Wars socks for Stance, a limited edition poster for Dax Shephard’s Armchair Expert podcast summer tour, illustrated ads for Turtlebox, and a mural for Tom’s Watch Bar in LA.
That’s not to say it was always easy. Over the course of my conversation with Joshua, we spoke about the near death experiences Chomp has faced, and how he’s learned to ground himself by understanding the impermanence of it all, not forecasting too far into the future, and remembering that no matter what, he can always be making stuff. When it’s all said and done, making stuff is the thing he says he feels like the luckiest guy in the world to be able to do.
Over the course of interview we cover:
How he made it through the transition to freelance work
His philosophy of how the mind works (re: change your behavior to change your mind)
Why humor is such an important part of his DNA and how he runs his business
Why he doesn’t set goals, and how the thing you didn’t foresee can actually be better than what you were imagining
How confronting near death experiences as a brand has changed his relationship to the unknown and uncertainty
How a focus on family, health, and integrity in business define his “no directions” path today
How would you describe what you do for work?
I’m a commercial artist and brand designer, and then I have an apparel company called Chomp.
I listened to an interview where you spoke about how one of the most challenging chapters of your career was your initial transition to being a freelancer…having to find your first clients, money stress, figuring out how to price your work, etc. What do you think kept you going through that time?
In the beginning of any business, you’re just trying to find business. For me, that was just about making lead generating my main priority by doing as much finding people, meeting people, and bumping into people as I could. In the beginning, I probably wrote hundreds of cold emails just to start a freelance business.
When you’re full-time at a company, you don’t really know anybody who’s looking to hire designers. It’s a totally foreign thing, so you have to develop a whole new muscle just for attracting clients. Cold emails were my way of “knocking on doors.” I think cold emails are becoming a little more obsolete because of automation. (I want to say fuck automation to every single person who is using it to fill up my inbox. These people don’t value anyone’s time).
Outside of that, I was just shaking hands and trying to meet as many people as I could. Getting the snowball headed downhill required lots of networking. I knew I had the design chops so I was less concerned about that part.
Before the interview started, we were having an interesting conversation about the brain and your views on how the mind works. I think that will provide some nice background for the rest of the conversation. Could you share more about the philosophies you’ve developed about how the brain works, and how that’s been informed by your own journey?
My mind is chaos. It’s filled with a constant barrage of thoughts like, “Oh, I’m hungry,” “I saw a horrible news story,” “Oh, this person, are they mad at me?” “I haven’t exercised in a while, am I out of shape? The book, The Four Agreements, has this concept called “mitote” which is described as “the chaos of a thousand voices” in our minds. I think that’s what I walk around with. I don’t think I’m an exception in that regard; I think that’s probably true for most of us.
I think there’s something to accepting that your mind is off in La La Land, and accepting that its got its own dialogue that is really not germane to your daily life, but knowing that if you engage with it, you’re likely to create all kinds of problems for yourself. One of the things that I like about my job is that I’m a tradesperson so I can get involved in the doing of things all day long. Running an apparel brand can also be really fun and chaotic, and it’s way more fun than the chaos of my mind.
People think they need to change their mind to be ready to do the things they want, but I think they need to do the things they want in order to change their mind. In the case of something like design—I might be worried that this thing won’t turn out well. That doesn’t really matter. I need to start designing anyway and make lots of stuff, and maybe a few things will look good, or maybe all of it will look good. It’s the same way with an apparel company. I hope this next design is a huge banger. It might be or it might not be, but I still need to design lots of stuff to make it happen.
I think it’s about trying to build a world where you’re active instead of spending too much time reflecting. A to-do list helps me combat having a disorganized mind because I can actually see what’s in front of me. I have a list behind my computer right now of 10 projects I’m trying to get across the finish line before next week. That really helps me because I’ll think, “Oh, I have so much work to do,” and then I’ll look up and realize it’s a lot less than I think.
In summary, making lists helps me organize my mind and doing prevents me from ruminating. The final thing I’ll add that helps me from a mental perspective is just exercise.
In listening to some of your prior interviews and reading your X posts, it was clear to me that you have a great sense of humor. Your brand, Chomp, also has a very irreverent ethos, and I get the sense that you’re very comfortable in your own skin. That said, I’m curious - do you ever get held back by fears of what other people think? If so, how do you work through those moments?
In terms of humor, I think I’ve always found that in everything I’ve done. I would prefer to always be a little more lighthearted. Initially, it was a reaction to the more serious, stoic brands that were around at the time I launched Chomp. There was this myriad of very serious, stoic brands giving aspirational quotes and phrases, and it all seemed so goofy to me. I think it’s fine to have moments where you’re like that, but having an entire brand that was about trying to look cool while you’re outdoors felt worthy of being made fun of in my opinion. That’s in my core DNA — thinking things are goofy or making jokes or whatever. Unfortunately, that’s just who I am. You can ask my wife.
In terms of concern about what other people think—not so much. I only cared about it a little bit during the age of cancel culture because I wanted to be cautious about not attracting too much heat. But I don’t really play in the arena of politics so it doesn’t affect my company too much.
One time I posted a mugshot of someone who got arrested wearing a Chomp sweatshirt, and we got some heat for it. The person did not commit a violent crime; it was a person who was drunk in public. I just thought it was funny. Of course, we’re not endorsing that person—everyone who sees it should know that. I don’t really think humor, edge, levity, any of that stuff should be problematic; I think they are things to be embraced.
I can’t take myself too seriously because I make graphic design. If you’re asking me if I’m comfortable with my own skin, I probably have always been that way. My nervousness and anxiety comes from more existential stuff like: Am I gonna go out of business? or Am I doing the right thing with my life?
I do want to ask about the existentialism. I think every entrepreneur probably can relate in some way. Right now, AI is a hot topic and there are lots of fears about AI coming for your job. But I think what’s interesting is that if it wasn’t AI, it would probably be something else. Every entrepreneur is somewhere on the wave of: What are my competitors doing? Am I gonna go out of business? What if XYZ happens? How have you learned to ride the wave of those existential moments?
Not to be all stoic about it, but everything’s kind of impermanent and in flux all the time. I certainly had those fears about AI maybe a few years ago. As I’ve used it or incorporated it in my daily flow to correct my grammar or spelling in newsletters, or used it as a jumping off for taglines or something like that, I’ve gotten less worried about it taking my job. I really don’t think it’s a proxy for creativity. If anything, there are many times where it feels very uncreative. It’s basically a slot machine. Maybe it’ll get better at those things. I’m hedging but I just don’t think that it will.
To answer your question about dealing with existential problems, I’ve found that it really helps to talk to people about those things. If you can express the thing that you’re afraid of out loud, and even just notice on the face how preposterous someone else finds that thought to be, it can be helpful. When you’re a founder of something, you can be in your own mind and become absolutely convinced that the thing that’s gonna destroy you is on its way. It can be really helpful for someone to hear that and say: That’s what you’re thinking?
The burden of a founder is that you are the one to make all the decisions. You can be stuck in your own head as a crazy person as you steer the ship. You can get confirmation bias that the decision you made to avoid a certain conflict was actually good, but you can really delude yourself about almost anything. I’ve tried to become better at focusing on metrics that are real indicators, rather than on what’s happening in mind. Things like sales, how my reps are feeling, and how my customers are feeling. These are all the real indicators of whether my business is healthy or successful.
One thing that stood out from your prior interviews is a commitment to building your business in a way that works for you. I personally loved this quote from your post entitled, “I don’t set goals:” I don’t think ten steps ahead, I think one step ahead. Can I make something today? The answer is always, yes. I know that regardless of where Chomp will be next year, or in ten years. I can continue to make things. That’s the only goal I have. My advice to you is, don’t set a giant goal. Instead of making an album, write one song. Want to be an artist? Take a single drawing class. Just take one step. And f*ck goals.” Can you talk more about what informed this philosophy, and why it’s been important for you in building Chomp?
I’ve had a lot of goals fail, but I’ve accomplished a lot in spite of that. This sounds unbelievable, but it is true: We’ve sold over 2 million individual items over the last 10 years. It’s hard to believe that number is real.
When I started my apparel company, I thought it was gonna be this very exclusive, almost premium brand that was going to become the coolest, hottest thing ever. It didn’t become that. It’s not because it isn’t cool to the people who purchased it, it is really cool to those people, but it isn’t being written about in blogs. There’s no PR apparatus around it.
You have this naive view about what this thing is going to become, and then it becomes something different, and sometimes the thing that’s different is better. I have a company that provides for my family. I have a company that gets to be a vehicle for collaborations. I have a company that sells millions of t-shirts and doesn’t have to be the one that’s the darling of the media.
If you would have given me the option to go back in time and choose which reality I live in: the one that has all the cool cachet or the one where I get to keep a low profile, make lots of really fun stuff, have no limit to whatever weird stuff I want to make, and all of that pays my mortgage, I’d choose the latter option every single time.
There is a short-term goal, which is to make stuff, but, from a long term perspective, all I can tell you is that I have two collaborations on the books, and I don’t know what’s gonna happen in between there. A lot of my entrepreneur friends have the same feelings. If you’ve ever tried to build something with the goal of selling it, you also realize how difficult that is as a goal as well. You’re at the mercy of the market and outside forces all the time. So if you think that you can always manifest some big dream that you have on a specific timeline, there are often other market forces that will tell you otherwise.
You seem pretty comfortable with the unknown and uncertainty at this stage. Were there ever moments in your journey where you were really uncomfortable with the uncertainty? What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed in your relationship to the unknown over time?
You just have to suffer enough tragedy, you know? You essentially build the resilience to know that anything can happen.
In 2019, I signed a licensing deal with a sales group and manufacturer. At the beginning of the year, my wholesale business was not huge, but it was a low six-figure business. And at the end of that year, after signing that deal and handing my entire business over, my sales were zero on the wholesale side. On Christmas Eve, I basically asked to get out of my contract with them. I didn’t know if I was gonna have to hire a lawyer. It was one of the worst days ever. I’d literally popped a bottle of champagne back in 2018 when I signed the deal, and then in 2019, I fired the company I’d signed the deal with.
That was the first big loss, and I really had to confront the questions: Can I sell this brand? Am I going to have to close it? I was already in talks with somebody at the end of that year to potentially broker a sale. And then, in early 2020, I signed another license deal with a different company. Of course, we know what happened then.
You just have to suffer enough potential deaths to know that no one’s infallible. We can all experience loss or tragedy in business, and once you have enough of those things happen, you realize that they can really happen at any time.
All that to say, my hope is always to keep my head down and make stuff because as long as I do that, new realities are made and new opportunities are made. Each time that I thought the business was gonna die, I forgot that I’m a tradesperson and that I can always make designs. Even if the business isn’t rolling out $100 million in annual sales, I can still create stuff.
Now that I’ve gone through enough serious tragedies, where I thought for sure I was gonna go out of business and then somehow made it to the other side, I’ve just learned to deal with uncertainty by focusing on getting back to the basics of making stuff.
I don’t want to put words in your mouth so you can tell me if I’m not capturing this, but it sounds like something you’ll hear a lot of athletes say, which is about learning to be less attached to the outcome and really committed to your process, which I think, funnily enough, often does help with outcomes, but it’s because you’ve let go of an attachment to a particular result on a particular timeline.
Exactly what I’m saying. It’s kind of a thing I’ve probably tweeted a couple times—the idea that if you could just work really, really hard and never care about an outcome, then that’s probably the best way to go about life and business. But we’re dreamers and believers so, inevitably, those things do cloud your emotions and judgment.
I should say I’m probably the luckiest person on the planet. However close to death my business has been a few times, I’m still fortunate enough to be able to make stuff.
Are there any new business philosophies that you’ve developed on the other side of those experiences?
Those experiences definitely clarified, for me, the businesses I don’t want to be in. When I was considering taking investment capital for a little bit, I realized I didn’t really like private equity. Maybe private equity makes you rich, but just the experience of even dipping my toe in caused a resounding reaction of, “I do not want any part of this.”
The reason why Chomp is able to sell so many t-shirts is actually because we exist on a quick turn calendar, meaning we’re only making clothing that’s gonna show up in the marketplace in a couple months, and my retailers are placing purchase orders for products that will show up a few months out. We’re not holding onto a lot of warehouse stuff, and we’re not doing flash sales to dump a bunch of products. There’s very little waste in my business. That’s not just because I don’t like waste. It’s coming from a more pragmatic standpoint and view that investing all the capital to hang on to a bunch of apparel that you don’t know for sure you’ll sell is a really bad business model.
I also realized that I like the quick-turn business, I like forecasting my business only a couple months out, and I don’t like forecasting my business a year out. The reason why I don’t do seasons is really just the same thing. Seasonal calendar, seasonal photo shoots, all this stuff is just trying to forecast way too far in the future. Trade shows, not knowing who’s gonna show up, or how many dollars are gonna be spent, or if you can even meet the minimums of getting a t-shirt or garment made, I don’t fuck with any of that anymore.
I was mentoring a gal right before we hopped on this call, and I said to her, “My goal for you and this call is to get you the most amount of time doing the stuff you like, and making the most amount of money doing the stuff you like.” That’s really the framework for how I try to run my business.
I’ll finish up with two final questions. How are you intentionally crafting your life inside and outside of work? Put another way: what’s your “no directions” path look like today?
Foundationally, spending as much time with my young children has been the true north of where I want to be. It sounds cliche, but you really see how fast they grow and how quickly they change. You can’t cryogenically freeze them and slow it down. You get this one time, and then it’s gone. It’s not to say that adulthood isn’t as meaningful, but the wonder they have at this stage and how much fun you get to have as a parent are really special. I have well-behaved kids so I really like being around them, and I can take them to a lot of places. That’s my number one.
Number two is just keeping myself healthy. My wife was sick for about a year with a mysterious illness, and it took her making lots of changes to her life in order to get to the other side. Health is wealth, and that has become so clear to me. Being healthy both physically and mentally really are the keys to being productive and happy, and keeping the people around you happy.
On the business front, I really do feel that I’m probably the luckiest person in the whole world. I know I’ve told some stories about nearly going out of business, but the fact that we’ve bounced out of it so many times, that there is always some momentum, or some next step to take, has caused me to worry a lot less about work.
Being honest and ethical in business, doing what you say you’re gonna do, not overcharging people, giving people a product they really, really want to use and have utility for in their lives, are what’s important to me. I’m afforded an opportunity to say no to stupid companies that sell snake oil. I’d say maintaining integrity in business is probably my third pillar.
Last question, if you had to put a title on this chapter of your life, what would it be?
We have this phrase at Chomp that we use on a lot of our garments called “Never Worried, Never Hurried.” And I am always worried, and always hurried. There are moments when I’m never worried, and I’m still hurried. This is the busiest season of my life to date. I really would like the next chapter to not be always worried, always hurried, and to just be way, way more relaxed.
Maybe we call it “going for less worried and less hurried.”
Yeah, let’s go with that. I’d even be cool with 10% less worried and 10% less hurried.