This project is not a business plan. It is an act of stubborn optimism.
I want to put difficult ideas on cotton so strangers read them twice. I want the person on the bus to scan a QR code and end up reading about a genocide they had never heard of. I want a kid to see a shirt that says “Autistic” and think it looks cool, not shameful.
I want a world where people wear the messages that matter to them — not as fashion, but as position. Where a t-shirt is not just a t-shirt but a statement of what the wearer has learned and what they refuse to forget.
What Success Looks Like
Short term: A growing library of free designs, each one researched and credited. People downloading them, printing them, wearing them. A small but engaged Instagram following that cares about the research, not just the image. A few printed shirts in circulation through partnerships, carrying the message to people who would never find this website on their own.
Medium term: The message reaching beyond my own audience. Designs appearing on marketplaces where strangers discover them through search — Redbubble, TeePublic, Etsy. An Instagram presence that drives conversation, not just sales. The Neurodivergent Pride line reaching people who need to see “Autistic” on a shirt and feel proud, not ashamed. Financial sustainability — the point at which this work covers its own costs and mine.
Long term: A community of people who wear the message, print the shirts, and spread the research. Not followers — participants. People who contribute ideas, research, and designs of their own. A brand that has grown beyond the person who started it, and that is ready to be opened up to a wider, wiser audience to decide where it goes next.
Spreading Awareness
Every shirt is a seed. The person wearing it might have read the research. The person who sees it on the street almost certainly hasn’t. But they might go home and look up the phrase. They might scan the QR code. They might type in gquixote.xyz. Or they might just remember the word and stumble across the idea later.
This is why the design formats matter. Not everyone wants a QR code on their back. Some people want the message and nothing else. Some want the link so the reader can find the site without dealing with the wearer. All three formats exist to maximise the chance that the message reaches someone who wasn’t looking for it.
The mission is maximum awareness. The vision is a world where enough people have encountered these messages — on shirts, on Instagram, on marketplaces, in conversation — that the patterns of history become harder to repeat. Not because someone told them not to. Because they recognised the pattern themselves.
If They Copy, the Message Still Spreads
Let’s be practical. These designs are likely to end up on Temu or Shein regardless of what I do. That is the reality of the internet. I have two choices: pretend it won’t happen, or accept it and work with it.
I choose to work with it.
If I monetize early through print-on-demand partnerships, marketplaces, and my own site, I get to take a cut from the revenue my designs generate — rather than letting copycats monetize them completely and getting nothing. Establishing an official sales channel also discourages copycats from coming in, because there is already a legitimate, affordable source.
But if, despite my best efforts, they do copy — I would actively encourage it. Here is why: they are doing the advertising and marketing for me. They are putting my designs on chests across multiple countries and reaching people I could never reach on my own. The designs carry the research behind them — the ideas, the historical patterns, the questions. Curious people who see a shirt and wonder what it means will end up on the internet searching for it. Some of them will eventually land here.
Every copied shirt is still a message carrier. Every person who wears one — whether they bought it from me, from a marketplace, or from a copycat — is walking around with a lesson from history on their chest. The mission is maximum awareness. If Temu and Shein carry that awareness to countries and people I can’t reach, the mission is being served.
The goal was never to own the message. The goal was to spread it.
Community Stewardship
If this continues to be part of my life and the audience has grown, the long-term vision is to open this brand up to a wider, wiser audience. Not to sell it. Not to hand it off. To open it.
The people who wear the message, who read the research, who contribute ideas — they are the ones who should eventually have a say in where this goes. The mission stays the same: maximum awareness of the lessons from history. But the stewardship expands. The person who started it doesn’t have to be the only one steering it.
If even one person pauses before repeating an old hatred because of something they read on a shirt, this will have been worth it.