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Photos by Erica Techo.
Gage Laswell, a VHHS senior, started his own clothing company with a friend.
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Photos by Erica Techo.
Gage Laswell, a VHHS senior, started his own clothing company with a friend.
Gage Laswell grew up on the Cahaba River, and now, as a senior at Vestavia Hills High School, he is working to give back.
Laswell is the owner and co-founder of Cahaba River Clothing, a T-shirt company that gives part of its sales to the Cahaba River Society. The idea for Cahaba River Clothing was something Laswell and co-founder Alex Ferguson, who is no longer a part of Cahaba River Clothing, came up with after noticing all the litter and pollution around the river.
“I realized, since we live so close, after a rain the Cahaba would rise, and it would just be all brown and muddy,” Laswell said, adding they would often see plastic or glass around the riverbanks. “We wanted to change it. I hate to see that, and I grew up there.”
After a brief brainstorming session, the pair decided to start Cahaba River Clothing. They decided to use Comfort Colors shirts, something that was already popular at VHHS, and give $1 from each T-shirt sale to benefit the river and its preservation.
“The Comfort Colors shirts have always been popular at Vestavia,” Laswell said. “You see them all the time, and me and Alex were just talking and he said, ‘Why couldn’t we do this? This doesn’t seem too hard.’”
When Laswell approached his parents about the idea, he said they were supportive but probably didn’t see the idea coming to fruition.
“I think they just thought, ‘Eh, I don’t know if he’ll do it or not,’” Laswell said. “They were always supportive. And a month later, we have a business license; we’re starting to print, and we’ve got it going. They were really surprised.”
They kicked off the company with pre-orders to help offset costs and received about 50 orders. As high school seniors whose only starting capital was from part-time, after-school jobs, Laswell said that step was necessary and also helpful in getting the project going. A lot of the support from their preorders came from classmates.
“Most of our preorders were from students because we didn’t have the money for advertising, so that really helped us out,” Laswell said. “They were all supportive. They were blown away that just in a month, we said, ‘All right, let’s do this,’ and then we got it done.”
The Vestavia Hills community and others at VHHS also have been supportive of the business. Laswell’s former environmental science teacher, Brad Waguespack, helped connect him with the Cahaba River Society for donations and volunteer opportunities, and other teachers have bought shirts.
“Vestavia has always been inspiring,” Laswell said. “There’s not been anyone that has said, ‘You can’t do this,’ or ‘You shouldn’t do this.’ It really helped me.”
VHHS’s co-op program, which Laswell is a part of, also helped with the busy schedule that comes along with running a business. The co-op allows Laswell to get out of school at noon in order to go to his job at Lifetime Fitness, and some afternoons he is also able to do work for Cahaba River Clothing.
“Usually what I do is I’ll get home at 12; I’ll eat something, and then I’ll either start on homework and finish that, or I’ll do something for the business,” Laswell said. “Yesterday, I got home, got something to eat and went to the Cahaba River Society to make sure they got our check, and then I started looking into Google and search engines, trying to learn more about that, so we can get more page views to our website.”
Without the co-op program, Laswell said he doesn’t think he’d be able to run the business.
“I wouldn’t have enough time,” he said. “I would have to focus more on my classes and less on the business.”
As a freshman or sophomore at VHHS, Laswell said he would never have thought he’d be running his own business. He was not applying himself as much in school — he had a 3.3 GPA — but getting a job in his junior year helped show him how much can be accomplished with hard work.
“Junior and senior year, I bumped it [my GPA] up to a 4.0 after I got a job and said, ‘I can really do this. It just requires some hard work,’” he said. “That’s what really allowed me to do it, because after I got a job, I realized with hard work you can really accomplish anything.”
While Laswell is looking at out-of-state colleges to attend next year, he said he does not believe that will interfere with his ability to run the company. It will stay local for the time being, and he is looking into a retail space, new designs and new products to help expand the company. The goal is to help support the river, which Laswell said most people want to do.
“Everyone loves the Cahaba. It’s the main part of Birmingham,” he said.
For more information about Cahaba River Clothing, go to cahabariverclothing.com, or @cahabariverclothing on Instagram.
