Epidemik Coalition
by Travis Ekmark
All About
According to a recent Wall Street Journal article half of all new college graduates believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. What you are reading is the first part of a series of articles wherein MA explores some of the realities of the business of design in Atlanta alongside some of Atlanta’s more entrepreneurial recent design graduates.
We meet the gentlemen of Epidemik Coalition at their studio in The Center for Design Study. We walk into the space through double industrial-sized French doors and Larry Luk and Georgios Saliaris are there, immediately to the right, at two long desks, across from one another. They are each staring intently into an Apple Cinema Display. We stand for a moment, waiting to be noticed. They don’t even acknowledge our entry. “Oh, hey!” Larry says suddenly, looking up, smiling; “we just got in.”
Larry Luk
Larry and George started to become known in the Atlanta art and design scene when, as students at Portfolio Center, they started printing limited edition t-shirts of their designs. The shirts were immensely popular and Larry and George’s natural charisma made their brand, Epidemik Coalition, stand out from their peers.
“We started screenprinting while we were in school at Portfolio Center, and we kinda started a line while we were there,” George explains. “After we graduated, we wanted to take it further.”
“All of the stuff we did at PC was hand-made, limited edition screenprints, you know; we only made maybe twenty at the most.” Epidemik Coalition was selling their work on their website and at Standard Boutique in Atlanta, but they knew they wanted to grow the business: produce more shirts, get them professionally made, get them in other boutiques around the nation.
This month, Epidemik Coalition has debuted its first clothing line intended for national distribution. It’s called Process and Larry and George have been working on it, day in and day out, for months.
“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” says Larry, when asked about running a start-up business. “The day we finished grad school, we were full time.”
‘Georgios Saliaris
George adds: “It’s just as hard as I expected it to be; I didn’t expect it to be easy at all.”
Larry says, “With the [older, limited edition] EC stuff, it’s like, “oh, hey, i just did this cool thing in Illustrator, lets go ahead and put that on a t-shirt. That was about as intense as that got. This was like months of planning out all the art, and how does the line fit together as a whole? It was more…of a process.”
Several times in our conversation, the phrase “on it’s way up” emerges: A dj the guys know is “on his way up.” A designer is “on her way up.” Larry and George are “on our way up.”
In the end we talk for a while about Atlanta, the city that the pair describe as “on its way up.”
“Atlanta is kind of like New York in the 80’s,” says Larry. “There’s an opportunity here to play a big role in changing things.”
“It’s not really finding other people in Atlanta who are doing exactly what we’re doing,” Larry continues, “but it’s finding other people who we relate to, who have that same drive and ambition that we have.”
Larry and George have been planning a party to debut their new line. At the time of our interview, the event is only a day away.
“The party that we’re having tomorrow at El Bar…El Bar’s the kinda place that we like because it feels like Atlanta; it feels like home. It’s just one of these places, you know; it’s the size of this table, but everyone wants to go there because it feels good. The dj who’s playing the party is probably the best dj in town ever, but people don’t recognize that yet because he’s still on his way up, he’s about to go open for Justice in Arizona next month. So, he’s on his way up too; so we like him and we got him to do our thing and there’s a mutual understanding that we believe in him and he believes in us.”
The next move for Epidemik Coalition is to expand their already growing design consulting business. Having just finished an internal project for Coca-Cola, they are eager to take on more client work.
Learn more about Epidemik Coalition:
Photography, Kevin Byrd