What is Underthreaded anyway?

Hello. I’m Liam, co-founder of Underthreaded. This blog post is a quick introduction to me and the Underthreaded brand.

I am 27 years old, living near Cambridge in the UK with my beautiful wife and daughter. I feed my family as a software engineer in the finance industry.

My younger brother, Luc, and I started Underthreaded earlier this year. We have the goal of being the first programmer focused lifestyle brand to be done right. We use the term lifestyle brand because we want to make a positive impact to the lives of developers. What does a lifestyle brand do, you ask? As for us, to start at least, we sell clothes.

Now, doing it “right” is a subjective topic, and there is no true “right” answer here. The tech industry and community are dominated by big tech employers. This is where the majority of the money and therefore attention live at the moment. Underthreaded isn’t likely to change that yet, or even soon. Our plan is to add a new dimension. A dimension with very little skin in the game, tech-wise. This gives us the opportunity to benefit the landscape in several ways. Hacking our incentives into a win-win formula that benefits the tech community, and avoids any tricky conflicts of interest or nefarious intentions.

The first thing we will be doing in this vein is donating to free software for every purchase made. So every sale we make is a win for us and for FOSS projects! Wearing our clothing is physical proof of contribution to free software.

Our philosophy on clothing

My university classmates would be horrified to hear that I, of all people, have gone into fashion. Although, I haven’t really. As we try to channel the engineer’s pragmatism; clothes should be simple, durable and comfortable. Loud clothing has its place, but for us, quiet is king. Subtlety is our aim. No sarcastic quotes or code snippets here. Nowadays, fast fashion has infested our stores and landfills. We advocate slow fashion; clothing which you can wear year round, no matter current trends. Clothing you can equally happily wear at home, the office or out and about.

I’ve gone back and forth with my views on branded clothing, and only recently came to the conclusion that my frustration with big branding was that no brand spoke to me deeply. All brands out there are sporting, mountaineering, luxury or similar. So, here is Underthreaded, the brand for the engineer. Although we are biased towards software engineering, we welcome all those of the maker mindset.

Our values

We care about issues no other clothing brands do.

Open source software and maintainers are the lifeblood of the technical community. The software written for free and made available to everyone is an incredible asset to businesses and individuals alike. The people writing this software often do it to help others, for fun, or out of their own interest, with little to no reward. When there is so much value provided, we want to try our best to bring more reward into these hobby projects, and make the dream of living a good life while building open source software a reality for as many as we can.

High quality developer learning and entertainment has been instrumental in our journeys as developers. The hard work and dedication to sharing knowledge that some content creators have put in is inspiring. The communities built around them are amazing for how they create opportunities to learn new things, even if you don’t participate. Whether it be the creator’s own community, or the communities sharing and discussing the content on platforms like hackernews or Reddit. We plan to be a driving force to push the quality of content as high and as far as possible.

Programming is one of the few hobbies which is also a viable profession. With it being a profession, it’s very commonplace for all the negative workplace connotations to arise. Toxic workplaces, burnout and the like can distract us from the joys of creating and problem-solving that come with coding. We believe in healthy living and aim to drive industry norms by championing the standard for what work-life balance should be.

Rescuing the Web is our responsibility. It’s weird that a commercial company is against the commercial web, but we are. The web should be clean, free of pop-ups and data mining. We won’t track you or sell your data. We love the web and want the best for it, and want to encourage the best parts of the web to flourish. Someone needs to lead the way to show that these malpractices aren’t a requirement to function as a company on today’s web.

We can’t talk about values without mentioning the environment, which we of course love, which is why we do our best when choosing materials, suppliers and processes to keep in mind the impact we might have.

Wrapping up

I hope you resonate with our feelings and see why we think our mission is both important and worthwhile. Join us on our journey into the unknown. Maybe check out our stuff and see if you like how it looks! We hope to become the brand you feel proud to wear because you know we care about the things you care about too.