Before it’s a shirt, it’s a scribble.

A notebook idea. A weird character. A phrase that won’t leave us alone. That’s where Nith & Grand begins — on paper, at home, in Paris, Ontario, where the Nith and Grand Rivers meet.

We’re a family-run Canadian studio, 100% Canadian from fabric to finish. Our comfort fit shirts and hoodies are built on Gildan blanks, then designed, printed, pressed, packed, and shipped by us.

Once a sketch feels alive, we bring it into Procreate to rebuild, colour, and refine it. Then we use tools like Kittl to sharpen the fonts, backgrounds, and final details. The tech helps clean the glass, but the picture still comes from us.

We built the website ourselves with help from Replit, and Shopify handles the checkout, shipping, taxes, and returns so we don’t have to drive every package you order, ourselves… Well, not all of them.

From pencil mark to heat press to front porch, this is homegrown work with a little river-town weirdness in the seams.

It all started with a Prof concert and a fun idea.

I’d never done a meet and greet before, and I wanted something cool to wear. My brother taught me how to turn my sketches into digital art using Procreate and an Apple Pencil. Then my teens showed me how to use AI for backgrounds without letting it take over the actual drawing ideas. My kids aren’t huge fans of AI, but they taught this old man how to use it as a tool — without creating the first Terminator.

Making shirts was so much fun that I started building an Amazon shop to sell a few side-hustle designs. Then my best friend saw how deep I was getting into it and said, “Fuck Amazon. Let’s do it ourselves.”

You have to understand — Steve is a true Cuzbro. Anytime my wife and I tried to get a movie made, raise money for a restaurant, or chase some out of reach dream that somehow still made sense to us, he’s been there. Jesus, he even survived the Weed Farm days — and that was a year of living dangerously (swat team included).

Tell ya later.

So the plan thus far, now stands: the shirts help us raise funds and contacts for the first movie, and the movie helps pay for the family legacy-restaurant. Long game, y’all!

“Stuck to it, no luck to it. How Rust do it, no rush to it.”

Step one complete.

Stay tuned.