While shopping with her 13-year-old daughter, Diana Kalandros said she became disgusted by T-shirts geared toward girls with what she called "crude and nasty" messages in youth fashion: Promiscuous. You're ugly. I'm so hot, I can steal your boyfriend.
So the 44-year-old started producing faith-inspired shirts from her Abingdon home.
The shirts she sells online for $14.95 have a word printed on them, such as Forgive, Convicted, Faithful or Grateful.
"Kids don't have to dress with a trashy message on their shirt," Kalandros said. "I don't find any humor in them. Lots of shirts try to be humorous, but they're just dirty. They don't contribute anything positive."
The idea to start her own company, Faithful Gear, came after she and her daughter ventured through malls and department stores, searching for age-appropriate clothing. They ended up snapping photos of shirts they found offensive.
Over the years, they amassed a collection of what they call "nasty shirts," which is posted on Kalandros' Web site.
One particular shirt irked her while she was on a cruise in Mexico with her daughter.
"There was a display of T-shirts for sale and one read: `Who cares about the rapture, when there's native girls to capture?'" Kalandros said. "I have to wonder, what kind of a message is it sending?"
Kalandros said her designs are simple, plain tees with a religious word printed across the chest. She launched her company with the first T-shirt, Faithful.
Every month, she releases another design with a new slogan. This month's is Discipline.
Her favorite T-shirt has the word Convicted, which she admits attracts stares, whispers and questions like: "What did you do?"
"It means I stand guilty of being a follower of Christ," Kalandros said. "It's a way of connecting with people and making sure they know there's a positive way to live and it starts with the shirt we put on our back."
She estimated that she has sold about 400 of the Faithful Gear T-shirts since the company was launched in December.
Customers order a T-shirt from the Web site and Kalandros mails them or delivers them if the buyer lives nearby. Her basement stores hundreds of the printed shirts in stacks of plastic containers.
Kalandros said her advertising is minimal - it is listed on free sites like Craigslist and MySpace, after her teenage daughter, Sophia, taught her how to open an account.
