I've been a designer pretty much my whole life. Building brands, creating things, making stuff for other people. I love what I do, but when you spend your days working on everyone else's ideas, sometimes you forget what it's like to just make something for yourself.

Then the pandemic hit, and I found myself drawing again. No clients. No briefs. No deadlines. Just some Prismacolor pencils and whatever popped into my head. It felt good to create something without having to explain it to anyone.

One day, I was at Michaels picking up more pencils when I got talking to a woman demonstrating embroidery machines. I've always had a thing for patches. As a designer, there's something about taking artwork and turning it into something you can actually hold. The texture, the stitching, all those little details. She probably thought I was crazy. I'd never touched a sewing machine in my life, but somehow I walked out with one.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

A few weeks of YouTube tutorials, wasted thread, broken needles and some pretty terrible attempts later, I started figuring it out. I wasn't interested in making the usual stuff. I wanted to bring the things I grew up loving—hip-hop, street art, graffiti and pop culture—into something completely different.

I started posting a few patches online and stumbled into the morale patch community. Turns out there were a lot of people who liked the same weird stuff I did. I started making small runs, selling a few, then making more. Before I knew it, The Proper Patch was a thing.

Over the next few years, I experimented with PVC, Ranger Eyes and collections like Cronies and Slayings. What started as a random purchase at Michaels had turned into a pretty serious obsession.

And somewhere along the way, I started paying attention to the people buying my patches. They were into knives, flashlights, pouches, lanyard beads—all the little things that make up everyday carry. Funny enough, I was into all that stuff too.

But the more I got into EDC, the more I felt like something was missing. A lot of the gear looked the same. Military-inspired, overly tactical, not much personality. It reminded me of the patch world when I first started.

I kept thinking, what if I took everything I'd learned making patches and applied it to the entire EDC world? Not just patches, but gear, accessories and collectible objects. Stuff I'd actually want to carry. Things that felt a little different, a little unexpected, and didn't take themselves too seriously.

That's how Dead Loot came to life. What started with a box of colored pencils and a sewing machine I had no business buying has turned into something I never saw coming.

Welcome to Dead Loot.

— Mark & Roxy