Our Story

Tyler, Texas

Believe it or not, Chuck's actually started as a high school assignment.

Spring of 2022, my senior year of high school, my English teacher gave the class a project. Build a business. Name it, write its story, design a product, put together a plan, present it over a few weeks. Most people picked something reasonable and not nearly so specific, but this itched a part of my brain that had never been scratched before.

I named mine "Chuck's Trunks" and decided we were going to make board shorts out of trash.

That was the whole pitch. Cleanup crews working the beaches, hauling in plastic, melting it down into pellets, spinning the pellets into thread, sewing the thread into shorts you could surf in or stand in on the bow of a skiff. Take the thing off the beach and put it back on the person who loves the beach. I was seventeen and I thought I had solved something.

I built logos for weeks. I had more fun on that assignment than I had had on anything in a long time. Then I turned it in, graduated, and did absolutely nothing with it.

The Forty Dollar Shirt

A year later I was at junior college in Tyler, which is where I am from, and a professor handed out what was essentially the same assignment. Build a business, present it to the class. One difference. This time you had to bring the product with you.

Board shorts were not happening. Not on a college freshman's budget, and not with a supply chain that existed entirely in my head. So I called a buddy who worked at a screen print shop in town and asked what it would cost to print exactly one shirt. Forty dollars, roughly, because a batch of one costs what a batch of one costs, naturally.

I brought it in and presented it and got a hundred on the thing.

My professor said something semi-encouraging, but she was also kind of mean, and I was not in a place to hear it either way, so it did not land the way it should have. However, while I was building that presentation I had a thought that turned out to matter more than the grade: I could make a website for this.

That was volume one. We are on something like volume seven now. This site you are reading has been torn down and rebuilt more times than I want to admit, and it will probably happen again.

What Changed

I should be honest about where I was during all of that.

High school was a little rough. I had some tough patches with my social life, and I carried around more self-doubt than I knew what to do with. I grew up in church, but I was not living for the Lord and I would not have pretended otherwise. I had no direction for where I was heading in life, and if you had asked me at eighteen to name three things I actually enjoyed, I would have had to seriously think about it, and I probably would have gotten back to you a week or two later.

Thankfully, though, I got a break. In the peak of one of the hardest seasons I have ever been through, my freshman year at TJC, my brother Mark had been serving at a Christian camp called Pine Cove Silverado and he told me all about it. He extended an invite to apply. I did, and in the summer of 2023 I went to work there, and that is where the Lord got a hold of me.

I have worked there three summers now, 2023, 2024, and 2025, and I am not the same person who showed up the first time. Eighteen year old me would have zero idea who he was looking at, which is something that makes me really happy to think about.

That is the honest center of this whole thing. Everything about how Chuck's is built, the giving structure, the reason a percentage goes out the door before I ever see it, the refusal to make this only about selling shirts, comes from that. It is all for the glory of the Lord and His Gospel. Without that, this is all for nothing and it would fall flat on its face.

The People

I have never done any of this alone, even the parts where I was technically by myself.

My mimi, Janet, is the foundation of belief in our family. Her own faith found her in one of the hardest places a person can be, and the way the Lord met her there is genuinely supernatural. That story belongs to her and not to me, so I am going to ask her before I tell it. What I can tell you is that everything running through the rest of us started with her and worked its way down. There is a straight line from her to the reason this company is built the way it is, whether she would ever take credit for it or not.

My mom, Kim, is my biggest supporter and always has been. She teaches elementary school, which tells you plenty about her patience, though the patience is the second thing you notice about her. The first is that she actually cares, all the way down, about whoever is in front of her. Family is everything to her and holding onto the people she loves is the thing she does better than anybody I know. Every version of this company, all seven websites, the ideas that went nowhere and the ones that did, she has been the first person in my corner for every single one.

My dad taught me everything I know about fly fishing, hunting, and reading water. He majored in freshwater biology, loves the ocean about as much as a person can, and would rather be exploring somewhere new than almost anything. Most of what I love, I love because he showed it to me first.

My brothers, David and Mark, have been there the whole way. David is the oldest, and the age gap left some distance between us growing up, but art and music were always common ground, and a lot of the creative energy behind this came out of that. Mark is the one who told me about Pine Cove.

The rest of my family has been right there too, and the way they handle money is honestly where that ten percent idea came from. The sentence I grew up hearing was: somebody else needs this more than we do. Nobody made a lesson out of it. It was just what happened.

Andrew Maroulis came in early and helped get this thing off the ground when it was barely an idea. We met through BYX at A&M and he is one of my best friends and one of the most genuinely joyful people I have ever been around. He runs his own athletic program for people with special needs, coaches practices out of churches, and is stronger in his faith than just about anyone I know. He has since stepped back from the business, but I would not be sitting here with the LLC if he had not believed in it early. I got to volunteer at one of his practices and shoot photos, and that day did more for me than it did for him.

And my fiancée, Paige. Chuck's existed before I met her, barely, and I told her about it early because I could not help myself. She has pushed me on it ever since. She is the one who keeps telling me this is something I actually love and I cannot just let it sit there and blow away. She is my best friend and I cannot wait to spend the rest of my life with her.

Not one of them ever pushed me into any of it. Mimi gave our family its belief. Papa taught me stewardship by doing it where I could see him. My dad handed me the water. Mark opened the door to camp. My mom has backed every single version of this. David, my oldest brother, told me to go do something great. Paige would not let me quit. Every one of them went first and left the door open behind them, which is the only kind of leading I have ever actually followed.

Where It Is Now

I run Chuck's by myself.

There is a real LLC with a real business bank account and quarterly taxes I actually have to pay, which I find genuinely thrilling in a way I cannot fully explain. Most days it is me, a laptop, a sketchbook, and a screen printer in DFW who is kind enough to take my calls.

We make shirts, hoodies, hats, and stickers. I also sell my own artwork, primarily canvas and pen work, then also a lucky occasional freelance graphic design gig. There is a book with my dad in the works. Eventually of course there will be board shorts, because I have not let that go since I was seventeen.

Every design either points at the Gospel or points at something worth protecting. The coast, the water, the fish, the birds, the life my family has been chasing for three generations. Then ten percent of what we make goes back out to the people defending it. Surfing, fly fishing, hunting, being on the water, in the mountains, on flatland or lowland, wherever you might be, as long as it is outside and ideally in Texas. That is where the soul of Chuck's is born.

I am not trying to build a t-shirt company. I am trying to build something that outlasts me, the way a habit my grandfather never explained outlasted the house it started in.

Ten percent of everything Chuck's makes goes back to the coast that raised us and to the work of spreading the Gospel. Here is where it goes.