Lance Cranmer
February 8, 2014
The way Eric Irwin sees it, he and his fiancée Sharayah Lucas are simply filling a void that once existed in Washington C.H.
Seriously – where else in town can a person design a logo, print a banner, pick up some decals for their car, buy an unabashedly geeky t-shirt and sit down for a game of Magic: The Gathering all in one stop?
“There’s not much that we don’t do here or can’t get someone to do for us,” said Irwin, owner of the newly-opened In Shining Armor Designs at 145 N. Main Street in Washington C.H.
A North Dakota native, Irwin met his wife-to-be, a 2004 Miami Trace High School grad, while the duo were in the Army, stationed at Ft. Stewart in Georgia...
Shortly after Irwin’s time in the service was complete, he and Lucas teamed up to start www.MyGeekery.com, a website that specializes in geeky shirts, posters, decals and other odds and ends for the significantly obsessed Tolkien/Rowling/Dr. Who fan.
Irwin designs logos, while Lucas, and her sister, Courtney Powers, of Minneapolis, do the graphic designs for the clothing.
But why the focus on “geekery?”
“My fiancée. She’s a huge geek,” joked Irwin. “Her whole family. They like comic books and sci-fi movies. We took that inspiration and built off it.”
For two years the business operated solely online until the couple decided to move to New Holland in September. After that, they began to invest in the idea of opening a store.
“It was between Court House and Columbus. It was because of this building that we decided to stay here,” Irwin said. “It’s so much cheaper. It’s $500 for rent. Up there (in Columbus), the same space would cost us $1,500.”
In Shining Armor Designs opened its doors in downtown Washington C.H. in November and was an instant hit.
Irwin said that the business expanded from doing only geek-centric clothing to reaching out to both the Washington and Miami Trace school districts to do athletic clothing designs.
“We did the Miami Trace swim team shirts. That’s the only school-function thing we’ve done so far,” Irwin said, noting they opened shop after football season was over and just a few weeks too late to catch the start of basketball. “We’re going to expand our clothing line in the next few months.”
Irwin said that what has been the business popular so far was that they can do custom clothing designs that are affordable.
“We don’t have any minimum orders,” he said. “For a small business that just needs a few shirts, we can do that at a reasonable price.”
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