Last December during finals week, two students had an idea to create a new sort of clothing brand, calling it “The Cove.” The students, freshman Anthony DiCarlo and sophomore Charliepat Hart, both residents of Siegfried Hall, plan to sell high-quality clothing to college students, with a portion of the proceeds going to charity.
DiCarlo and Hart have already held one sale of t-shirts and are currently receiving orders for crew-neck shirts, both with original designs made by Hart.
“We had 17 [shirts] sold, so it was kinda small, but people were buying them and people wear them and more people are asking, ‘What is The Cove?’” DiCarlo said. “We’re currently doing a crewneck order [and] we currently have 20 orders. Hopefully as time goes on, with more exposure, we’ll be able to sell more and raise more money for this program.”
Hart said the inspiration to start the brand came while the two were studying for finals in the Fishbowl of Hesburgh Library.
“We were sitting on the couch, and I needed an outlet,” Hart said. “I moved the couch around to get to the outlet, and we found out that when we moved the couches around, it sort of created this cool space that resembled a cove, so we decided to call it the ‘cove.’ We just started to decorate it to make it feel more homey and to be a more enjoyable place to study. I went and got all my pillows and blankets from my dorm room — we made [paper] snowflakes at 3 a.m. one night. We brought a Christmas tree over, and we put a fireplace up on the TV. It was a very inclusive space — we wanted people to come in. We had communal snacks that anyone could take.”
Hart said they wanted to share this experience with other students.
“We decided that we wanted to share this with everyone and were thinking about how we could do that, so we decided to sell t-shirts,” Hart said. “Then we thought, instead of just selling t-shirts aimlessly, we could also put it towards a good cause, so we decided 20 percent of our profits would go to a charitable cause.”
Hart said that they currently are donating to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), a global charity “dedicated to the protection of whales and dolphins,” according to the WDC website. The motivation for choosing this charity, Hart said, was from watching the 2009 Academy Award-winning documentary “The Cove,” criticizing Japanese dolphin hunting practices.
Hart said that once he and DiCarlo became privy to what was going on over in Japan, “we decided we had to do something.”
DiCarlo said that The Cove does not currently have any staff besides Hart and himself.
“I was a co-founder along with Charliepat — we kind of both do about everything for it,” DiCarlo said. “We’re a two-man show running everything — working on new designs, new t-shirts, marketing, everything. It’s a dual effort in a sense.”
Hart said that he and DiCarlo have great aspirations for the brand while starting small.
“Our immediate goal is to become a real presence in our local area: this campus,” he said. “Long term, we want to be a premier outfitter for college students across the nation, for students who want that quality of Vineyard Vines or Patagonia but at an affordable price.”
“We’re just trying to be something that can provide good for the world, in a sense. Yes, we’re very small right now, but who knows where this could end up going?” DiCarlo said.
