From Sketches to San Diego Streets: How Sketch Lab Got Its Start

Two Friends, One Screen Printer, and a Lot of Ideas

When we first started Sketch Lab back in 2013, it wasn’t about chasing big names. It was about a love for design, storytelling, and creating things people were proud to wear. There wasn’t a launch party, investors, or a roadmap. Just two childhood friends with a screen printer, late nights, and a lot of ideas.

San Diego became our canvas: local schools ordering spirit shirts, neighborhood shops wanting a few hoodies, breweries taking a chance on custom merch. These weren’t flashy gigs, but they mattered. Each one taught us something about craft, deadlines, and the responsibility that comes with creating apparel people live in.

The Power of Word of Mouth in San Diego

In this city, reputation is everything. Do good work, and people will tell their friends. Mess up, and they’ll tell them even faster. That kind of pressure could break you, but for us, it became fuel.

Every order was a chance to earn trust. If the ink cracked, if the embroidery frayed, if we missed a deadline, that wasn’t just a mistake. That was our name on the line.

So we focused on quality and the details that last. Over time, the work started to speak for itself:

• A handful of shirts for a bar turned into a brewery-wide merch deal.

• Jerseys for a youth sports team led to contracts with local businesses run by their parents.

• One UC San Diego department order snowballed until we were outfitting whole programs.

We didn’t need billboards or giant ad campaigns. Our community was our marketing, and word of mouth was our growth engine.

From Neighborhood Orders to Heavyweight Clients

Those referrals stacked up. One job led to another until the phone calls started coming from names much bigger than we expected: Tesla. UC San Diego. Tecate. Canelo Álvarez. Hennessy.

It didn’t change how we approached the work. Whether it was a hundred shirts for a local nonprofit or a global brand rollout, the pride stayed the same: create apparel people actually want to wear.

The lesson? Growth doesn’t mean losing your roots. It means taking what made you strong in the neighborhood and scaling it to the world stage.

Pivoting with the Industry

Screen printing and embroidery were our foundation, but the industry didn’t stay still, and neither did we. Clients began asking for more: private label apparel, retail-quality finishing, packaging that felt premium, and distribution that could handle bigger audiences.

We could’ve stayed in our lane, but that’s not how you grow. Instead of outsourcing or handing projects off, we built those capabilities in-house. That meant investing in new equipment, learning new techniques, and expanding our team with people who shared our obsession for detail.

The payoff? Brands knew they could trust us from start to finish. Design, production, packaging, and shipping, all handled under one roof. No middlemen, no broken promises, just accountability and quality.

That ability to pivot is what kept us relevant. Trends come and go. Oversized fits, minimal branding, vintage washes, but the core never changes: people want custom gear that feels like them. By evolving with the industry while staying true to our roots, we’ve been able to deliver exactly that, year after year.

A Decade Later: Still Rooted in Chula Vista

More than ten years later, we’re still here in Chula Vista. Same streets. Same shop. Same grind. The orders are bigger, the names are heavier, but the foundation hasn’t changed.

At the end of the day, Sketch Lab is still about community, about craft, and about creating things people are proud to put on. We built our name one referral, one shirt, one design at a time, and that’s exactly how we’ll keep building.