Our Story

Three friends, one shared closet.

Faded Mojo started as a group text. Three designers who'd known each other for years, swapping pictures of thrift-store finds and arguing over which old logo was the best. Eventually someone said the obvious thing: we should just make the shirts ourselves.

How it started

We met over a stack of old matchbooks.

The three of us bonded the way design friends usually do: a thrift-store run in Denver, a flea market in Asheville, a parking-lot tailgate full of estate-sale boxes. Somewhere between a 1973 ski-resort patch and a glass ashtray from a long-shuttered motel, we realized we kept reaching for the same kind of stuff — the small graphic details that quietly held a whole era together.

We tried for years to find tees that captured that feeling. Most of what we found felt either too costume-y or too sterile — fonts from the right decade but no soul, or huge graphics that screamed instead of whispered. So we did what designers do: we made them ourselves.

Faded Mojo is what came out of that. A small studio working out of Highlands Ranch, Colorado, making graphic apparel that looks like it's already lived a life. Every piece starts with something we found — a postcard, a patch, a half-remembered place — and ends up on a shirt soft enough you'd grab it on instinct.

Meet the studio

The three of us.

  • Cal Flores
    Concept & Research

    Cal Flores

    Cal grew up combing yard sales for things nobody else wanted — cracked road maps, broken souvenir spoons, faded patches. He's the one who finds the story first: the closed lodge, the dive bar that lost its sign in '92, the roadside motel with the great vacancy lettering. By the time Maddie and Dave see it, Cal's already named the collection in his head.

    Most-treasured find
    A jacket from a Colorado ski resort that only operated four seasons in the 60s
  • Maddie Holloway
    Type & Layout

    Maddie Holloway

    Maddie collects letterpress proofs and 1970s lift tickets, and she's the one who insists a kerning fix is worth another day of work. She runs the type and layout side of the studio — every word and arrangement that lands on a Faded Mojo piece passes through her hands at least twice. Her sketchbook is mostly tracing paper and ink stains.

    Most-treasured find
    A 1971 matchbook from a Wyoming diner that closed in '88
  • Dave Goodwin
    Color & Print

    Dave Goodwin

    Dave studied textiles before pivoting to apparel, and he's the reason every Faded Mojo piece has the right hand-feel. He picks the blanks, dials in the color palette, and won't sign off on a run that doesn't pass his 'tossed-in-a-car-seat-for-six-months' test. If a shirt feels worn-in the day it arrives, that's him.

    Most-treasured find
    A pair of paint-spattered 1980s painter pants from a Goodwill in Pueblo