Lore

Illustrating and Celebrating Our Public Lands, with Matt Moreau of The Landmark Project

Shortly after moving to the beautiful Upstate area of South Carolina, I purchased a cool looking t-shirt with a colorful design of Lake Jocassee featured on the front. At that time Jocassee was one of the few places I had actually managed to explore in the area, and wearing the shirt gave me a prideful sense of finally feeling like a local in my new hometown. Not only had I developed a connection and love for visiting this amazing new lake I discovered, but I now had a shirt to prove it.

Little did I know that four years later the owner of that small t-shirt company would be one of my closest friends or that I’d be interviewing him about the tremendous growth of his company and the impact it’s had within the outdoor industry near and far.

Matt Moreau first started Dapper Ink, a screen printing company, over 10 years ago in Greenville, South Carolina, where it’s long be a staple of the local community for t-shirt design and printing needs. Overtime though, with his experience running Dapper Ink and passion for the great outdoors, Matt’s idea and desire to create an outdoor brand slowly began to take shape into what is now The Landmark Project.

Fast forward to today, and you can find The Landmark Project t-shirts and goods sold in stores across the nation, with artful illustrations depicting hundreds of the country’s most known and beloved parks and landmarks.

This story is definitely one you’ll want to listen to in full… but if you have to skip ahead or want to revisit specific parts later, feel free to use the outline below for locating some of the key points we touched on in the conversation.

5:00 – How The Landmark Project Came To Be

13:00 – The Three Designs that Started It All

15:00 – Marketing in the Early Days

24:00 – Just Trying to Make a Really Good T-Shirt

25:30 – Learning to Grow Responsibly

30:00 – Landing the Big Fish

35:00 – Redesigning Smokey Bear

42:35 – We’re A Storytelling Brand

43:39 – It’s Not A Sense of Ownership, It Is Ownership

47:00 – Setting Aside Personal Time for the Outdoors

52:46 – Giving Back Through The Brand

55:40 – The Consumer Is So Important

58:50 – What’s On The Horizon

 

Show Notes:
Guest – Matt Moreau
Host – Jeremy Elrod
Music / Audio Production – Nic Lauretano
Editing – Jeremy Elrod / Nic Lauretano
Location – Atlas Local, Greenville, SC