Carla

Fortune:

“You will make a fortune with a friend.”

    “The idea was sprung one day in 2002 in a Chinese restaurant in Hollywood when O’Brian, An australian living in Los Angeles received a fortune cookie message that read, ‘You will make a fortune with a friend.’  Taking it as a sign, she came up with the concept of fortune cookie messages on t-shirts and packaging them in a takeout box.

    The first step was to research fortune cookies and see what messages would be best to go onto t-shirts.  First step was eating  a lot of Chinese food and collecting a lot of fortune cookies until she realized you could actually buy them in bulk.  So she went to a store where she bought a pack of 30, until she realized you could actually buy boxes of cookies.

    From there, the internet seemed a better place to research fortune messages.  She complied a list of hundreds of fortune messages.

    Collaborating with her friend Megan MacEachern, the pair started to realize the baby market was probably the best place to start and they came up with a small collection of baby t-shirts that said, ‘A nap is in my near future’ and ‘A surprise will appear in my pants’ and set up a booth at the Hollywood Farmers Market where they sold out instantly.  The cute concept was instantly liked by customers.  They were onto something.  The ladies immediately used the money they made and created more.  Soon, FORTUNE TEE’s were making their way onto bodies of chic babies and kids everywhere.  Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, Cindy Crawford, Kate Hudson, and many others quickly established FORTUNE TEE as the must-have item.”