Junior Osita Ogor and senior Straja Dimitrijevic have started their own clothing line this year.

The brand name, ‘Elohim’ reflects their desire to promote inclusivity and unity, drawing from their personal experiences and beliefs.

“Elohim means God in Hebrew, and we wanted to use it because religion can be used to bring people of all races and nationalities together,” Dimitrijevic said.

Ogor explained how they worked together to found the brand.

“We founded the brand on Aug. 2,” he said.

“Starting is not super hard with the plethora of available resources on the internet,” he added.

Sales have picked up steadily in the past few months, and Dimitrijevic reports that their sales are currently in the five figures. 

However, they did face some challenges in the first few months. 

“Looking back there was a lot of work in the beginning; lots of late nights designing, contacting manufacturers, and making ads,” he added. “But we enjoyed it, so it wasn’t hard for us.”

“The hardest part of starting the brand was staying motivated in the beginning when we had no consistent sales,” Ogor said. “All in all, starting anything in life becomes extremely easy when you have passion for what you’re doing.” 

Ogor’s design skills were an initial spark for the brand.

“Initially we designed the clothing by ourselves by using previous drawings that Osita made,” Dimitrijevic said. “But now we have expanded to other designers, and we start with their thinking and we edit the designs as we see fit.”

“When making our first design, we swiftly decided how we wanted our first collection to be presented. We went for a darker, enigmatic feel to the collection,” Ogor said. “That only took us around three days to design the first T-Shirt.” 

Dimitrijevic explained the manufacturing and shipping process. 

“We’ve bounced between a few manufactures, but right now we have an overseas manufacturer that we communicate with regularly,” Dimitrijevic said. “Once we get our manufacturing order we get all supplies that we need and we spend a few hours packaging the orders. Afterwards, we bring all the orders in laundry baskets and drop them off at the post office.” 

Originally, Dimitrijevic  focused on marketing and customer support while Ogor reached out to designers and manufacturers. Recently, the two have switched roles to shake things up.

“We both have interests in entrepreneurship and we got inspiration from people around us and decided to make a clothing brand,” Dimitrijevic said. “We both have our own niches and we work really well together so we figured we could achieve great things together. It’s a fun and stressful part of our lives, but it also teaches us a lot if we want to pursue something similar in the future.” 

Dimitrijevic further explained the significance of the brand name. 

“It stems from us personally as well, like in all truth Elohim was born from pain,” he said. “When we started this we were both down in our lives and wanted to birth something good from it.”