What makes you iconic?
Venture story
ICONIFY.
A social language you could wear.
- Role
- Founder, designer & builder
- Years
- 2019–2020
- Type
- Fashion · e-commerce
- Status
- Open to partners
The spark.
People are so much more than what they look like.
When you meet someone for the first time, you see a face, an outfit — maybe a shirt with one band or one show on it. That’s a tiny slice of a person. Everything that really makes them who they are stays invisible.
I wanted to turn that inside out: let people wear more of their inner world, so that a stranger could look at you and think “oh, we share that” — or “wait, I wear that icon too.”
The question.
What if you could wear a little more of who you are?
Not with a slogan, but with a language anyone can read: icons. A few things you love, dislike or stand for, composed into one design that is only yours — and an easy way into a conversation.
Individualism meets minimalism.
A shirt generator in the browser: pick a style and colour, search more than three million icons, place up to fifteen of them, invite friends to add theirs — and the shirt gets your name. Missing an icon? You could request a custom one, and I drew it by hand.
The Kevin
Fair by design.
Showing more of yourself shouldn’t cost the planet. Every shirt was organic cotton, vegan and fair-made, printed in Germany and shipped in paper — and the copy said openly where and how it was produced.
Into the Christmas season.
I built ICONIFY solo on a no-code stack and launched it in December 2020, just in time for Christmas. Most shirts were bought as gifts: people composed a shirt for a friend — the most personal present they could think of.
Why I stopped.
The part that excited me most was done: I had an idea, built it, launched it and got people excited about it. The zero to one was over.
And something didn’t sit right. However fair and organic the shirts were, every order meant producing new material — for what was, in the end, a playful idea. So I let it go and took the lessons with me.
What I took from it.
I love the zero to one — and I learned to notice when it’s over. I learned that a good label doesn’t settle the question of whether something should be made at all. And I learned how much people want to show who they really are.
That last part never left me. Making the inner world of people visible, and helping them find each other through it, is still at the heart of my work — today in mitmensch.
A second life for ICONIFY?
Maybe AI-first, maybe without new shirts at all. If you’d like to give it a fresh take, let’s talk.