Express yourself

Hello! I'm Jen, founder and designer of Raw Threads. I am a Florida Native and went to school at the University of Florida where I played volleyball, bodybuilded, taught undergrad classes and then graduated in Advertising and Graphic Design. I spent a part of my sophomore year at the Disney College Program which eventually led to my first career at Disney. I chose UF for their veterinary program, but obviously my path ending up changing...

My running journey started in 2006 when a friend challenged me to run a half marathon at Disney and everything after that was history. I was hooked. Now my life was organized around what races I wanted to run.

Our Origin Story 

Let's Run

The more I ran races around the country the more I realized how poor the quality of fabric and designs were for runners. And everything I owned or bought to train was in was super tight, plain, and would shrink after several washes. The sizes were so limited, I either had to wear a boy youth shirt or an ill-fitting v-neck were the fabric had zero stretch. All of the designs were 1 color, white type centered on the shirt. Not very creative. Running shirts needed to be better, way better. The designs needed to be full color and portrayed a strong message and the fabrics needed to be innovative, eco-friendly and most importantly performed well. Challenge accepted.

Read more about our beginnings 

Let's get loud

You wouldn’t guess that I am a shy and prefer to be behind-the-scenes designer. But graphic tees allow me to express what I'm feeling without having to say anything. And I wanted to express that everyday in my outfits.

After spending a good majority of my career working for Disney as a graphic designer, I realized in 2010 that running clothes will be my next focus and there needed to be a clothing line added to the world that was loud and graphic! So Raw Threads was born in March of 2010.

We Quit our jobs

My husband and I quit our jobs and put everything into storage. My office now became the front seat of a cargo van. We started driving across the country with a van full of shirts to live my dream and spread the message of our bamboo shirts. We drove state to state, expo to expo, marathon to marathon across the United States, even to Alaska for over a year and half straight barely making it home to Florida to see our family. We met so many amazing people across the country that still buy from us today.