Although he'd fallen in love with Chicago, Christopher Festa was weary of the teasing he endured about being a Cubs fan. So when manager Dusty Baker left the San Francisco Giants for the Cub-house two years ago, Festa, ’87, was jubilant. The gloating e-mail he sent to former Bay Area colleagues and Stanford alums bore the subject line In Dusty We Trusty.
It also struck him that the phrase would look good on a T-shirt.
Some 10,000 shirts later, Festa’s pledge of allegiance to Dusty has become a Chi-town staple. The shirts, which come in several styles and cost between $20 and $35, sell online at festastuff.com and at street festivals, boutiques, Chicago-area Nordstrom stores and, starting this season, Wrigley Field itself.
Festa, blessed with a name that means “party” in Italian, has dropped a tech career in knowledge management to build a fashion company that celebrates hometown sentiments. Other shirt designs praise Midwestern girls (the “corn-fed, fun-loving, up-for-anything” type) and area code identities (the “312-FOR-EVER” shirt promises that the wearer will “never, ever, ever move to Naperville” or any of 23 other alphabetized Chicago suburbs.) A longtime lover of road trips, Festa hopes to create silk-screened wear for locales throughout the United States. He says he avoids a “carpetbagger” reputation by reading local newspapers and websites and “reality testing” his slogans with friends in each area.
His company, founded in May 2003, projects sales of $200,000 this year, a figure that presumably could experience blips along with the Cubs’ prospects. Festa feels confident the Cubs are “gonna break the curse” that’s kept them out of the World Series since 1908. “Ideas are in the vault, under lock and key” for the shirts he’d produce if the Baker boys were to win it all.
