Whether you’re a car lover or not, these cool polos are a great way to rev up your casual look for summer. Inspired by cars and car customization, Redline99 offers unique, high-performance polos and tees that keep you feeling as cool as you look. Created by George Haynes, an Atlanta native turned LA local, these are not your run of the mill polos found in every department store or sporting goods outlet. The high quality polos use top fabrics that help whisk away sweat while maintaining your steeze. Keep your competition guessing with Redline99 polos and tees. Redline99 goes the distance with style. Sporty steeze never looked so hot.

Bossip: When did you start Redline99.com?

George Haynes: I’ve been working on it since 1999 but brought it to life in 2006.

Bossip: What does the name Redline99 mean?

George Haynes: Redline: In your car there is a RPM gauge (tachometer). At the far right of this gauge there is a red/orange space…that’s the “Redline Area”: the maximum point of pushing the engine before it potentially blows up or fails…so for me it’s pushing as hard as I can, until I either “blow up” or “fail”.

Bossip: What was the motivation to start Redline99.com?

George Haynes: I wanted to work on things that I was personally passionate about and I love the creative (X)perience. Making some thing from nothing and watching it grow. I guess it’s symbolic of me in some ways.

Bossip: What is Redline99.com website all about?

George Haynes: That’s just the website, but Redline99 is a creative lifestyle that looks to create various lifestyle (X)periences through fashion, film, music, motorsports, etc. I wanted to build something completely contradictory to my marketing day job; where instead of using creative to market products, the creative becomes the product and the marketing falls out of the creative expression.

Bossip: Who is your ideal customer/target market?

George Haynes: That really varies depending on the creative (X)perience, it’s part of the reason we use (X)…to convey this is a variable. One minute we could be releasing a fashion (X)perience that is made for the creatively expressive and the next we are working on a film script (X)perience that touches the heart through the emotions of anger and love. We are very non-traditional in our approach, most companies talk about targets and markets, we like to look at real people in real places. We look to target lifestyles and if you are a fan of the lifestyle then it doesn’t matter to us if you are male/female, black/brown or yellow. If you love music, the lifestyle of music will always reign supreme over what color or how old the person listening to it is…so though we look at demographics we built the proposition around passionate lifestyle areas where we play. We feel this allows for a much stronger and more importantly more authentic brand promise.

Bossip: If you could choose, where would you retail your Redline99.com clothing line?

George Haynes: We would love to be exclusive in only 1-2 chains if we could find one that had national reach. When you go into stores now, most of them have the same thing and I understand that the more channels of distribution you have the higher probability to be purchased. However, we are looking at more of an exclusive situation to start. We think there is something to be said about discovery, especially if you can only find it in a few places. In this scenario the channel also benefits immensely as well since we would be driving people only to their store and regardless if the store visitor buy us or not, the channel still wins! We also have some other strategies in mind that would definitely motivate the channel to carry/sell us as well. But if I had to pick from some of the existing stores, we would look at more regional exclusivity for places like Shiek, DTLR, Against All Odds, Man Alive, etc. I really like the Shiek look out West, because they are more about shoes and we feel our fashion would be a good compliment to an urban shoe store.

Bossip: What inspires your designs?

George Haynes: Cars, Martial Arts, Insects, Animals, etc. Things that have some natural creativity but also some passionate aggression. I also have to give a head nod to Gene Gimono as he really got me into this fashion thing by designing my first jacket. For instance our golf style shirts are made to help sweat evaporation, they’re light weight and the finishing accents are automotive inspired. Luxury car seats sometimes have a base color that’s piped out in a contrast color. So our D-Baby (Angry Dragon) shirts start with a base color of black, blue, white, etc. then we pipe out the collar, tail and sleeves with red and along with a red top stitching.

Bossip: What are the other components to your company?

George Haynes: We also play in music, animation, film and getting into a few customization things as well.

Please visit www.redline99.com for more information and pricing.