Celestial Studios - LIKE NO WEAR ON EARTH - Established in 1995

It all began in 1995 in Durban, South Africa. I was at Art College at the time studying Graphic Design and the importance of branding. Two designer friends of mine, Luke Comins & André Van Wyk, decided that the brand of Christianity was not a good one and that the t-shirts christians were wearing at the time were doing more damage than good. Most people we knew thought that Christianity was for nerds and those that couldn't make it in the "real world." We couldn't understand why this was as the Christianity we knew was vastly different.

To produce a range of shirts in stock takes a lot of money. There was one problem, between us we didn't have any, in fact as I remember it we had to put our money together to buy a can of coke to share. We didn't even have even a computer to design with. Then there were marketing costs....I think you get the picture...

We considered borrowing money from the bank, but I think they thought we had gone mad (which was probably quite close to the truth).

The only thing we had was a vision and a strong calling to just put our faith into practice. Ok, maybe we shouldn't have told that to the bank manager...

So here's what we did...We did everything by hand. We designed a range of shirts, photostated them on to paper, coloured them in and stuck them to A3 sized polystyrene cut-outs. Somebody gave us an ultra violet lightbox which we made some weird contraption to mount our designs on and took this freak show to every Christian event you could think of.

We tried to get multi-unit christian retail outlets to stock our shirts, but they wouldn't take the risk as we where not recognised suppliers. So we took our show to the road...literally! Although my Dad (who is a wonderful missionary in Africa) lent us his car when he could spare it, but there where occasions when we just stood on the side of the road and hitched. We even made 2 signs to encourage people to pick us up. One said "I TELL GOOD STORIES..!!!" and the other said "I'VE GOT CHOCOLATE..!!!'

Nobody ever asked us to tell them them a story (which I think you can guess what that would be...nothing like a captive audience!), but sometimes we told them anyway! As for the chocolate...we were stoked nobody asked us for that ;)

John Gardner of JOY magazine in South Africa agreed to meet us and put our shirts in his magazine for free! (Our first real break) Thanks John!

The other big break for us was that Cliffy Westraad got us into a club he had bought which he called "The Fire Station," from his successful restaurant business that was to be a place where christian artists could either perform or exhibit their talents. An idea that brought the national television station down and we ended up being interviewed on a program called J&Co. which we ended up doing their t-shirts for.

There was a buzz about our shirts and some of the guys from bands like M.I.C, 180 and tree63 started to wear our shirts on stage which REALLY helped us. Thanks guys! It's a powerful thing when Christians work together! I look forward to more of that! Part of the reason is the obvious opposition of evil to stop people from wanting to be part of something wonderful. The other part is our fault. As Christians we have fought wars in the name of God, abused the weak and gullable to do our dirty work. A part of our history that we are not proud of. In the name of God, leadership has fallen into the wrong hands and people have suffered huge disappointments by the Church and perhaps will never come to Christ as a result of these experiences. We hope that maybe one day, one of you wearing one of our products will change all that in your own way! From the magazine articles and the countless events we went to, we took a deposit book and took orders and used that money to produce the shirts. We did all this within about a 6 month period, and then we did it again. André left us as the pressure of paying the bills was understandably too much!

Luke and I continued for a while, but not getting any deals with South African multi-unit retail outlets eventually brought incredible financial strain on us and we had to put our vision on hold for a while.

Luke ended up working in the Ad industry in South Africa and I ended up in London doing the same. I gained both design and business experience working for both the big and small agencies in London. I probably would have stayed there, but my Dad got ill and I had to come back and run his business while he went into theatre for an operation.

Just before that I was walking in the middle of London to a church that I had never been to before wondering if I should stay in London and send over the stronger currency to my parents or go back to South Africa. As I walked I prayed and asked the Lord: "Lord I REALLY need and answer here, I don't know what to do!" That night the little Baptist church had a visiting preacher that I believe was a prophet. I don't even know what his name was and neither of us had ever met before. To my surprise he walked straight up to me and just said: "GO HOME!" Now to somebody else that could have been extremely offensive being told to "GO HOME!" But to me it was everything!

Up until that point I had never really believed in personal prophecy, but had read stories in the Bible like in John 4. (The story of the Samaritan woman at the well).

And so, that's what I did...I went home, back to South Africa.

And now after about 7 years of dormancy we now have the new Celestial Studios - "LIKE NO WEAR ON EARTH!" website.

All the Glory must go to Jesus for truly without Him, we are can do nothing! Please pray for us!

If you've read this far...Thank you to everyone who has and will support us as we make History together...and yes, Jesus does want you for a sunbeam!

His kind of sunbeam!