Back in 2008 I attended a con­fer­ence where there was a child spon­sor­ship orga­ni­za­tion called Compassion. There were a lot of peo­ple my age sign­ing up to spon­sor chil­dren all around the world. Personally I did not have the money to spon­sor a child and won­dered how I could pos­si­bly help.

I won­dered what teenagers like me spend their money on and I real­ized it is music, enter­tain­ment and cloth­ing. Well I can’t sing, def­i­nitely can’t act so it looks like I am left with cloth­ing. The thought I had was why don’t I start a cloth­ing com­pany and whether some­one wants to or not the prof­its will go to spon­sor chil­dren around the world. Being only 16 I didn’t think much of it, but briefly men­tioned it to my par­ents. They really seemed to think that it was a good idea. I con­tin­ued to tell oth­ers and every­one told me that I should do it. The only issue is that I am not an artis­tic per­son at all, I am the math and sci­ence guy and all this artis­tic stuff goes right over my head. All that aside I started putting some designs together under a cou­ple other names. Running into some oppo­si­tion I decided that it wasn’t for me and applied for uni­ver­sity to go into engi­neer­ing (the com­plete oppo­site of the cloth­ing industry).

So there it was, I was done with cloth­ing and I was ready to start my engi­neer­ing pur­suit. Then week one hap­pened, I started think­ing about the vision I acquired just a year ear­lier, I thought of a new name. It was always my favourite out of all the ones we ever came up with, I could just never think of a logo. The name was “Pocket Change”. So I spent all my physics, cal­cu­lus, alge­bra, pro­gram­ming classes try­ing to design a logo. Having no artis­tic abil­ity made it very dif­fi­cult. The last week­end of September came along and I went up north on a retreat with a bunch of friends. I told them all about the vision and we were brain­storm­ing for a logo. I had told them that the vision was sim­ply “turn­ing money into love”. That was it! I saw in my mind a clear vision of a dol­lar sign turn­ing into a heart. I imme­di­ately jumped on my com­puter and tried my best to do just that. Once it was all laid out the mid­dle image stuck out, that was it, our logo.

We had a name, we had a logo, and we had a good idea of a vision we just needed an out­let to sup­port. The idea was sparked by a Compassion call so maybe we should start there. Through a bunch of bless­ings I had an email of some­one who worked in Compassion Canada’s office, it was some­one who worked the phones, but it was an in. I wrote her and explained what we were look­ing to do and she loved it, she for­warded to the peo­ple that she thought should read it. And then I waited… One day I got a meet­ing with a cou­ple of their exec­u­tives to present my idea. When I showed up they were def­i­nitely sur­prised to see a 17 year-old guy walk in, and were even more sur­prised once they heard our idea. Compassion was in and now I had to do it.

Since then we have been doing great! We offi­cially launched our web­site and shirt sales on May 1^st 2010. We have come such a long way since then and we have only been going for about a year and a half, 2 years this week­end from the cre­ation of the logo. We have started man­u­fac­tur­ing our own cus­tom tees and hood­ies right here in Toronto. We are also cur­rently look­ing to revamp our vision to go back to the heart of our vision which is to “Share love, trans­form lives, fos­ter gen­eros­ity.” Part of this is a huge heart for the youth cul­ture right here in North America. Make sure you keep in touch with what we are up too, because there is a lot of excit­ing stuff on the way for Pocket Change. We thank all of you so much for build­ing this brand to what it is now. There is no way we could have done it with­out all of you. I hope you con­tinue to sup­port us as we start to expand our vision.

Jared.