Regular attendees of Solid Sound, Wilco’s music festival in North Adams, may already be familiar with Oxford Pennant, the quirky brand that sells custom pennants, patches, and other merchandise. Other folks might recognize their products at national parks across the USA, or on a merch table at a local gig. We sat down with founder Brett Mikoll and art director Evan Wachowski to get to know a little more about their projects at the intersection of Americana, music, and so much more. This interview has been edited down for content and clarity.
Can you tell me a little about yourselves? How did you start being interested in pennants?
Brett: I’m Brett Michael, co-founder & creative director of [Oxford Pennant]. Oxford was founded in 2013. Prior to that, I was also doing music photography, I was designing, I was playing music. That DIY scene is how I kind of grew up and earned my chops through design: making posters, merch, album artwork, things like that, also having a few odd jobs throughout.
Oxford started as a side hustle. I was freelancing with Dave Horesh. Dave had a 9 to 5 idea, kind of a freelance thing, but it started really out of a hunt for something else. Something that I always refer to… “is this all there is?” Are we just going to be living in Buffalo, making, like, enough money to pay our rent and that’s it? Is that how the next ten years go, how [do] the next 20 years go? And the only thing I didn’t want to do is start another T-shirt company at that point, because it was 2013 and it was just oversaturated to the max, especially in Buffalo.
Coincidentally…We had this idea of like, what if it was something else, but also simple to make, and it was inspired by a trip to Boston. We went to [“Bobby From Boston”]…, I don’t think it’s around anymore, but it’s this old vintage shop, and we both kind of loved that.
Just the hunt of finding some cool ephemera, whether it’s paper ephemera, T-shirts, whatever it might be. Pennants just seemed to be like: well, someone’s got to design it, and someone’s got to screen print it, and someone’s got to sew it, and sell it. And we know how to do two out of the three of that…We don’t know how to sew, but we can figure that out. And so it really started as, okay, well this is easy enough to make. We found somebody that knows how to sew or that we could outsource it to. And we made a Buffalo, a Boston, and a Pittsburgh pennant, because we knew we had friends in those three cities where, at the very least, we could ditch the pennants to them and be like, well, that was a fun little experiment.
Instagram was just…brand new… too, and [pennants] made sense as a thing to hold up in a photo, to almost be like a caption of where you are, what you’re doing. And so it kind of caught on. We actually sold some of our first wholesale units and custom units to a place in Somerville, right outside Boston.
So, you know, it was called [Boston General Store]. …That was one of our first accounts, which was cool. I guess it’s a long story, but, it kind of snowballed from there: we would post on our social, which didn’t have a lot of [follows], but then a store, or somebody would order a small batch of them, which I would design, Dave would sell, we would get somebody to make it. But the first couple really big moments relate to music: the merch director for the band Phish is from Buffalo, and her name is Julia Mordaun. She trusted us to create some original designs, and obviously Phish fans are crazy [dedicated] and…they tagged us in an Instagram post in probably 2015…That obviously really helped get some new eyeballs, and really showed us that, oh my God, we can design anything. If somebody hits us up, we can design something for them…and that kind of, kept going. We still did [Oxford Pennant] as a side hustle up until about 2017-ish. And that’s when we were like, the more gas we put in this tank, the further this company goes.
So if we put more time into it, if I quit my freelance stuff, we might be able to output enough so that we could pay ourselves, and really give this thing a go. And so that proved true as well. And then, around that time, I’m a good enough designer to fake it a lot of the ways, [but] ultimately you need somebody that can actually really illustrate and really, create some art from scratch and stuff. And that’s where the hunt for a first hire came in, and that’s Evan. And so I actually went through a round of searching, this was pre-remote work, right? Right. So we needed to find somebody in Buffalo that could take a chance on us.
And, that proved to be pretty difficult, too, because, you know, there aren’t that many design jobs in Buffalo anyways…and then also to convince somebody that, like, designing pennants could actually pay the bills was another challenge. And also to find somebody that had the range of design chops was also difficult.
So I went through a round of interviews with the whole bunch of people. Nobody seemed to be hitting the right notes for me. And then, thank God for Instagram yet again. I found Evan’s artwork on Instagram, and I DMed him asking him if he had a job, or if he wanted one. And that is the genesis…Evan came on board, and is now our art director…Evan, if you want to take it from here?
Evan: Yeah. Cool. My name is Evan…It was 2018… I grew up in Lancaster, in the burbs, and then went to school at Buff State for graphic design. [I] Stayed in the area and moved downtown. Around that time, I was doing a lot more freelance stuff for bands, doing album covers and shirts and posters and stuff to try and keep it fresh, and, like, working as a barista.
My mom…she would tell me all the time, you know, “a job won’t fall in your lap. You got to go out and apply at all these places”. And I kind of was, but then just out of the blue Brett hit me up about Oxford. And I was like, listening to The Gaslight Anthem…and it’s like, oh my God, they’re working with them…Yeah, it was amazing. Just out of the blue.
I mean, I’ve played music my whole life. I’m a drummer, primarily. So just, from the jump, this was such a fun thing to be able to get to do. It’s so varied. It keeps you on your toes. Right from the beginning, I was really stoked to be here.
Gosh, what are the odds that you were also in Buffalo, based on everything that Brett just said? That’s so crazy and cool.
Evan: Yeah, it really worked out.
Has your process for pennant-making changed much? I imagine it changed from the prototypes.
Well, kind of doing a fast-forward, we went from outsourcing most of the process so that we could all focus on either our other freelance jobs or our other work to oh my God, this is an actual thing we need to nurture it, spend time with it.
And a big part of that was insourcing all the manufacturing. So getting the machines, hiring people to run the machines, hiring people to learn how to run the machines, and then making the processes that could be replicated. So that all really happened, call it between 2019, 2020 and now. And we’re still trying to figure out how to make it the most efficient way so that we can say yes to all the opportunities, and not have, you know, a three month long wait time to get your product or something like that….Being able to get someone something that is meaningful, made properly, on time and at a price that… none of us come from money… at a price that really feels like a value, but a small little investment in something you’re passionate about.
So the process really does change. On the design side, on the creative side, it takes a bit of compromise of what you templatize, and what you stay true to…I haven’t talked about this a lot… if you do it multiple times a day, it’s probably obvious that it needs to be automated or templatized in some way, and that doesn’t take away the spirit of the finished product. It actually helps because you can do more for more people, and it’s an empowering constraint at that point.
So we’re still refining the process. We have much smarter people than me in the building working on refining each part of the process. But I will say that, like what I was just referring to, the spirit of the thing, the spirit of the company, I think still is that very much… startup, small city, kind of gritty.
You know, I don’t want to say “Us against the world…” because that sounds terrible, but, like, we’re doing something that probably shouldn’t be happening in 2024: a manufacturing operation run by millennials, in a city that doesn’t really have much going on, and [selling] a very niche product.
Evan: I mean, I would say that realistically, it’s the type of stuff that we emulate, you know, the really old pennants that I personally want to emulate and appreciate the look of…so ideally for me it’s like, we’ll be working with low print colors. We won’t be doing crazy complex, designs and stuff. So something we see on a lot of the really old stuff for these, it’s printed and then airbrushed, or painted over, or uses a lot of these production techniques… we have that [technology], but a lot of it is in service of emulating the old school style. Right? Part of the challenge of growing as a designer here is like, learning how to make your work look ‘wrong’ in the right way.
The charm of them comes from the faults and stuff. That’s more on the design side of things… If it was like, perfectly clean and whatever it wouldn’t be the same. So while the production technology and stuff has changed, I would say, at least from the design side, into production, The spirit of the old stuff is very much there: simple designs, low color counts. Yeah, super classic.
What are maybe some of your favorite pieces that you’ve gotten to work on?
Brett: Well, I think I would say working with a band like Wilco has been…a huge opportunity, but also it’s fun to also become a massive fan while also working on a project or a particular thing…They are, I can undoubtedly say, one of my favorite bands, because we’ve done such deep dives on them…I think that has to be one of my favorite things whenever it comes up, like historically and in the future, I’m sure it will still be one of my favorite things to work on, because they have such a history to dig into if we want it, but they’re also putting out incredible work still.
I love whenever we get a chance to have a project that we can add a little bit of history to, or our little chapter to…a history similar to like working with a Newport Folk or working with these massive things that, you know, ten years ago, five years ago, I would have never thought that we would have the opportunity…although of course, we love working with the punk bands, the hardcore bands, and really anybody from the music scene too! To go to a band like Wilco is just a thrill, every time, because it’s just like, oh my God…I can choose a total dad-rock hit from ten years ago, and I know the person that this is meant for. Or I can do something totally unexpected because I know they trust us to take risks.
Wilco has so much lore…would you say that the fan base also kind of affects the types of designs that you end up creating?
Brett: …You [do] have to make something that’s going to sell…I do think a fan base like Wilco, I think they take on the personality of the band, when it comes to showing something that represents their love of it. And so if it makes them laugh, it’s just like, yeah, this kind of holds true for anything we’re designing. But if it makes ‘em laugh, or smirk, or hit some sort-of emotional note for them of like, oh my God, I love that song because I played it at my wedding, or I wish I would have played this at my wedding, or when I drive at night, this is what I love to listen to. And if you can…tap into those tiny moments as much as a product on your wall can, but if you can really try to channel some of those feelings, and that could be the lyrics you choose, the colors you choose, all of those different choices you make. When creating something, you’re envisioning somebody that is at a Wilco show, or on their phone looking at the Wilco Instagram, and hopefully that comes through visually. So yeah, you do design for the fans. Evan I don’t know if you agree or not.
Evan: Yes. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I look at it sometimes from a different perspective of just some of these smaller or newer bands, like, in college I was an emo punk, pop punk guy. So getting to work with Jeff Rosenstock, and The Wonder Years, and Fall Out Boy, and all of these bands that I loved growing up, It’s been a fun challenge to try to juggle and combine a few different things.
It’s like, does this make sense on a pennant? This is a pennant. It’s not a poster, and it’s not something completely different. So does it thematically make sense? And then how can you blend that aesthetic and style with the culture of the fans and the culture of the band? You know, the rest of their merch, that people like and everything. So it’s something like the Wonder Years. I think I get the culture of it, because I’m a big fan of the band. …But, for some of these smaller bands, I know the ones I listed off are a little bit bigger, but it is fun to try to, especially for a specific tour or an album, to really hone in on that thing and see how we can translate it.
You’re talking about how form follows function in a way, but also as you’re working sometimes there are preconceived visions that you’re dealing with.
Evan: Yeah, I think I think you nailed it.
Brett: I think the biases or your fandom for a particular artist, or if we’re not familiar with an artist, and we have to familiarize ourselves with [them], whether it’s by listening or digging deep into their history. I think there’s a part of that that you can’t lose, total sight of: you are the one designing it. So you’re not going to be able to make something that everyone resonates with. But the reason why the band, or the person that’s buying it, is buying from Oxford, is they want our take on it. They want our spin in some way, shape or form, whether the spin is the lyric or again, like the way it was illustrated, is it collegiate, is it punk…Is it whimsical?…Because as much as it’s not about us… it does have to go through some sort of filter of ours for it to feel like it should exist in the world anyways, and that somebody else isn’t designing it.
When I was first emailing you, Brett, I was in the middle of a road trip, and I went to the Grand Canyon gift shop, and lo and behold, Oxford pennant [was there]. That was interesting because I, again, have mostly been associating you guys with bands…what is that like? Keeping your style true across all of those [things]?
Brett: Yeah, a ton of them…so my business partner Dave… his gift is talking, but also making connections, selling in an authentic way, finding the opportunities. So he is, in a way, super fearless about talking business with anyone [where] there might be an opportunity, and not in a way that feels like, ‘Why would we ever want pennants? Why would we ever work with you guys?’ and things like that. And I do think that it helps to have a product that’s been around for over 100 years that we can look back into the history of it…to start there…We’ve designed some really out of the box stuff, but always, rarely does it fall into the bucket of, this style is something we can’t do or something we won’t do or something like that, because there’s plenty of history in the product itself to spark the inspiration for it.
That makes total sense. Are there any other left of field collaborations that have been awesome to do?
Brett: We worked with a dog influencer.
Evan: Maxine!
Brett: Maxine. Maxine the Fluffy Corgi, is a dog influencer in New York City…and at first I raised my eyebrows. I’m like…who’s buying this? Are we really gonna invest our time in this? And that’s me being naive, and not doing a ton of research ahead of time… It was one of the best performing releases for two and a half years running, and [that’s because it was] meeting people where they are at this emotional level…they love their [own] dog. So as long as you can make something…whatever it is, but it reminds them of how much they connect with their dog and their life with their pets and stuff. So, it always kind of goes back to that, how do you make something very specific? But also, it’s going on somebody’s wall. So it has to also feel universally communicated enough that you don’t mind seeing it every day. Right?
I feel like it offers so much more flexibility than a poster. I have a lot of printed music posters… But there’s a nice texture to having a pennant wall.
Brett: I mean, bands can travel with them too. They are a lot easier to travel with than a poster, because with the poster you gotta bring the tubes, or you’re expecting your fans to bring those crazy looking, like pool cue-looking tubes that they can sling over their back.
You can bring hundreds of those in a Rubbermaid tote, and they all sell for the same thing. There’s no sizing. There’s no, ‘what do you do if it gets damaged?’ kind of thing. Because they’re pretty hard to mess up. But I think that that’s what helps with music artists in particular too, is like you can get it online, but you will also see them at the show if they’re working with us, because the price points are great for bands to bring, and they’re easy to travel with, and they’re not as [much of] an investment into your space as a poster might be. You might have a very fun way to hang a poster with the clips, or the weights or something like that, [but] a lot of people are like, oh shit, I gotta go get a frame for this, right? Of course, you could frame our stuff too, but that’s not necessarily the case. Especially at that price point, you don’t necessarily feel like you have to invest more money into it after you buy it.
This is an extremely technical question, but I also imagine the dye probably is a little bit heartier on the pennant than it would be on a piece of paper?
Brett: I’m not as familiar with the volume of ink you’d put on the screen printing rig, but it does feel like it’s going to be a bit heavier because it does have to soak into the fibers of the felt, versus sit on the surface of a piece of paper. Does that make sense?
Have you ever spotted your designs in the wild in a place you weren’t expecting them to be?
Evan: Yeah…I came across the pennant for this bar in New York City, the Windjammer in Brooklyn. [That] really must have been one of the first few custom patterns I designed. And then I was there last fall on tour with my band, and I was at the Windjammer, and I looked up at the bar, and I saw the pennant, and I’m like, oh, my God, I think I designed that four years ago! So crazy. So that was just a fun heartwarming little cute one. Yeah, sometimes you see the bumper stickers, or whatever, out and about or somebody rocking a tshirt or something, but, that was a fun little personal, full circle one for me I think.
Brett: I was just in Ireland, a few weeks ago, and the second bar of the entire trip that we went into in Galway, Ireland, there was a Lancaster, Pennsylvania pennant that I designed in probably 2015, behind the bar. That was hilarious, because I’m kind of spoiled at this point where I kind of expect it, at some point, to run into one. But it wasn’t even in my head yet that I might find one on the trip, and literally it was like, in front behind the bar. I’m staring right at it; I know exactly where I was when I exported that PDF to the printer. It’s so funny. So yeah.
I’d love to know what’s next? How are you continuing to experiment and play?
Brett: The great question. We use the analogy all the time of ‘We’re building the plane as we fly it’. Because there was no master plan when we started off. But there is an element of ‘How can we be smarter’, again, how can we be more efficient or templatize… the smart business ways to run this thing, but I also think that…in concert with being smarter, and making a sustainable business so that we all continue to have jobs and continue to grow this thing…how can we still be a little rebellious? Or how do we have fun or really add artistic value to the process so that it doesn’t feel like we’re not evolving? And so that’s a very general answer to like, what’s next? But I do feel that we’re going to continue to work with bands. We’re going to…work with big bands, small bands, up and coming acts and all that.
… And so I think the future, talking just about music, with Oxford is [to] continue to attract those bands that we might not see coming, but also seek out those bands that we’re fans of that we can convince we’re worth taking a shot on, and putting it through our filter and making some cool shit.
So I think that will continue just naturally, because otherwise we’re gonna get bored if we just have to work with whatever bands fall in our lap. But I think that is, you know, in the spirit of what I said before, of trying to be efficient but also artistic, I think, continuing to seek out those acts that have that same purity, or sense of ownership that we do.
Evan: That was a good answer. I don’t know what’s next, but again, that is a fun part of the job or working at Oxford specifically, is that…every week coming in, I never know what’s going to get thrown on my plate…see what boundaries we can push and stuff just the further you go, the more you understand what people want, what fans and bands want and stuff…we know a couple weeks out what’s on the list, but, you never know when Aerosmith or Slipknot or something else is just going to get thrown on your plate.
And so yeah, it is super fun to stay on your toes and like, be ready for whatever is next…I usually don’t know because I’m not selling the projects, but yeah.
I did have one more question I really wanted to ask: is there anything you wish you had known when you were first getting started that you definitely know now?
Brett: That people want our spin on something and, this is going back to the beginning…I still do stress sometimes about that…So sort of in 2019 with J Crew…I’m directing Evan and the rest of our team to be like, this is what I think they want. And the first email that came back was: cool, great, this doesn’t look like Oxford at all. What do you guys got? And it threw me for a loop of: well, yeah. What is Oxford? What does it look like? What are they talking about? And then you kind of have to just loosen your grip on the steering wheel a bit and you kinda have to trust your taste. You kind of have to trust your gut with that kind of stuff and, and understand that, maybe that ‘snarky positivity’, or that mix of tattoo and punk culture or whatever, that’s what they’re going for. So I think you only learn that by doing more. But if the question is ‘what do you retroactively wish you knew’?…just trust your intuition. Trust your taste more than what you think somebody might like. And you know, that’s pretty universal.
Evan: I was going to say too, just learning to set your ego aside a little bit…Trust your gut, when you can, simplify…I always used to think that every design needs to be the greatest design ever, right? Or it’s like, everything has to be a ‘barn burner’. Everything has to be new, and incredible, and change the world.…That’s something that’s taken a while to understand and learn….You can spend two or three hours on an illustration or custom type and stuff, and even if sometimes that’s what the client says they want, it’s probably worth throwing in an option with just the words that I wrote on the flag, you know?
Being able to let go of your ego a little bit…Right? It’s like, design is so contextual or whatever, right.
Beautiful intricate hand lettering: It can be, on its face, more interesting than, three lines of varsity text. But like Brett said, when you think about it on a wall, or the way that people can relate to it, or how many different people can relate to it, just being able to sit back a little bit and understand that this is working for a reason.
Totally. I really like the way you put that.
Brett: Yeah. Sometimes we talk about putting on your hard hat. Sometimes you just got to go to work just like everybody else, and you got to play the hits. And that’s an absolutely okay thing to do. And there’s nothing against that. Because if it wasn’t, we’d all just be in an art collective, and still broke and that’s that’s an okay thing too, but that’s not the path that we chose with this. We could have stayed in that way, but the fact that we chose to…be in the sandbox with real business? It’s like, okay, then we have to do both.
But the line between like, authentic creativity, and commercial success and sort-of knowing where you can be free to experiment, and maybe where you need to get your bills paid! [There’s] so much tension.
Brett: Right….I don’t know, but it speaks to the point of, like…if I’m 50 and still doing it this way, I hope it’s at least fun and we’re still making enough money to live the way we want to. And I hope that it continues so that everybody that works for us can build a life around doing this job…in a city that otherwise doesn’t really have many options to do that. But, that’s the goal. The goal is to kind of build something that other people can grow with you on.
And if and if not, then find the niche that you can. It doesn’t have to be a 300 person company, if it could be a 40 person company, but everybody’s doing great, then what are you talking about? That’s it.
I mean, there’s been a lot of really impressive businesses that have come out of upstate New York… Xerox, Kodak…there’s no reason you couldn’t continue to grow. But also, that’s not what you’re saying. What you’re saying is, it’s about keeping the fun in it.
Brett: Every office needed a Xerox machine. Not every office needs a pennant. But, yeah, you could argue…I think that this is not a strength of mine or anybody in the creative department of how to grow a super sustainable, profitable business, but again, that’s why we have a team of other smart people. They can’t draw for shit, but they can make the hell out of a spreadsheet that will help organize everybody. So it’s trusting people to do their job, and getting the hell out of the way too.
Takes all kinds for sure.