Kilo Kish Interviews the Founder of DEERDANA

The Creators Project: When did you start DEERDANA? Was it the first brand?

Dana Veraldi: I started DEERDANA as a website when I was in high school. I bought the domain and I just put my photography on it. It was just my portfolio site. It actually originally was a Beck fan site, which not many people know. In high school, I was obsessed with Beck. I probably saw him live 18 times, but he’s only been in Philadelphia maybe four times. I would make my mother drive me to see him in surrounding states. I drew him once, but he has so many different styles and phases he’s gone through. So my website was a photography website, and then I made shirts in a screen-printing class when I was a senior in college. I drew line drawings based on photos I’d taken of friends.

My photography was primarily portraits of my friends. A lot of them were in New York, because I’d go to New York almost every weekend. And I had done a shirt of my friend Jackson who was a DJ, and he was DJ-ing with model Agyness Deyn. So she ended up wearing her own shirt to a photoshoot, and that was the first press I got on the cover of Time Magazine. I was doing the shirts very DIY, not thinking about it as a business at all. I made them at school. I moved to New York the day I graduated from college. I packed both my parents’ cars and we drove to New York City and then I was putting them in my apartment in Bushwick. So I would print to order and I had a shirt of my grandmother, I had a shirt of bunny rabbits, just really random things. There was a similar style to all of them, but there was no business plan at all.

So were you shocked when you got the press for that first shirt?

Oh of course. I remember she called me and said they wanted to credit me so she said she’d just give them my website. I think I was selling them for $30. And I would mess so many up because I was not good at printing.

You were printing them in your house?

And hanging them to dry with clothespins, and printing on random shirts. Every shirt was random.

It’s literally one of the hardest things. You need a whole table…

And cleaning the bathtub, and the ink. It also was a carpeted apartment, and there were big circles of ink everywhere. I remember when I moved out I didn't even ask for my security deposit back, because I just knew I had to get out of there. There was ink everywhere. So I never had a business plan. It sort of morphed.

So at what point, were you about to start doing it seriously?

I never wanted to sit down and talk about goals and get an investment, which I still have not done to this day, which maybe is not so smart. But I just let it grow organically and then always had other jobs to supplement myself financially and also just to have a schedule of some sort. I don’t do the design seasonally, I just sort of do whatever I want. Like I worked for a stylist for three years and then worked for Adidas for a while doing freelance event projects, and then I worked with Theory, Tory Burch, and Trademark, just helping with different aspects of companies. I always learn things that I can apply to my own company.