In any creative endeavour, the key to longevity isn’t just about having great ideas, it’s about working in a team. A great place to work isn’t just about the wins; it’s about respecting each other’s opinions, understanding the flow of things, and making decisions that ultimately serve the bigger picture. Challenges are inevitable, taxes, production issues, logistics, and last-minute pivots all come with the territory. But when the foundation is built on trust and honesty, those hurdles become stepping stones rather than roadblocks.
For Kyle and Jared, that foundation of Water When Dry has been years in the making. Adapting to new challenges without losing sight of their vision, and moving forward with purpose has allowed them to create something truly special. Now, with a clear approach and a distinct perspective, they’re pushing boundaries with their latest collection, one that embodies their ethos of fluid creativity, intentional design, and an unwavering commitment to doing things their own way.
What inspired the name Water When Dry, and how did it influence the overall aesthetic?
Jared – So realistically, it all started during COVID. I bought 10 house plants all at once. I was super inspired by plants, but I was also a very social person who never really found a place for myself. The isolation of COVID made me turn to plants for fulfilment. I realised there was a connection, humans and plants, we both need water, attention, nutrients, all that stuff to grow. So I remember drawing a graphic, sort of copying someone else’s work, and I wrote, “Water the plants when they’re dry.” I thought that was kind of cool. I stripped it down to just “water” and “dry,” and I was like, yeah, this works.
I’ve been developing brand concepts for 15, 20 years now. It’s my passion. As soon as I wrote it down, I knew this was it. It took a while to develop, though. Just like with anything, a plant takes years to grow and mature. And now, we’re finally in a place where we have a community, we have what we need, and we’re just watering our plants. That’s our main phrase: “We just keep watering our plants, watering the garden, and growing.” That’s where it all started, the connection between humans, plants, nature, and everything around us. We’re all interconnected.
Could you describe the ethos and mission of the brand?
Jared – Community! Bro, it’s just community. We’re dropping a YouTube video tomorrow, and I personally love YouTube, I’m a big YouTube watcher, especially ComplexCon videos. I watch them and see so many people online just focusing on product, product, product, product. But when I watch our videos, it’s all about our community. We focus so heavily on the people. These clothes don’t matter. It really doesn’t. It’s about the connections we have. Kyle meeting Doomy, now I’m here with you. That’s what it’s all about for me, people, not the product.
Kyle – Just to add to that, when I hit Jay up and was like, “Hey man, what’s going on? How can I help? Where can we take this thing?” The biggest thing I remember from our first conversation, and every conversation since, was he made it very clear to me. He was like, “I don’t care about product.” I think you literally said, “I don’t care about selling product, I just care about community.” And I think a lot of brands can say that, right? People can throw around the word “community,” but it’s a completely different thing to live it.
When you talk about our Discord, that’s where we really thrive. We run our social media platforms, but I’d say we do it in a very unspecific way in terms of who’s behind the account at any given time. And, as you’ve seen, that’s intentional. But when we’re in Discord, I’m Kyle, he’s Jared, and we just want to engage with the people as much as we can.
I think that approach has really shown through. We’ve been building a brand that, at the end of the day, needs to sell product in some way to stay alive. But it’s always been community first. That’s what’s drawn me in from the outside, thinking, “Hey, I want to be a part of something. I want to be part of this.” And I think it’s resonated heavily. Our Discord and the way it operates, and the way people interact there, has really reflected that. We’ve been super fortunate because people have really latched onto that, and it’s allowed us to grow in that aspect. So, it’s been really cool.
A lot of your outerwear seems designed with walking and practicality in mind. What drove your decision to prioritise function in this way?
Jared – It’s just me. I heard it all weekend, people saying, “Oh, I’m trying to get you into shoes, I’m trying to get you into footwear.” And I’m like, I don’t care about shoes. I like style, I like fashion, but at the end of the day, we have to wear the clothes, and we have to walk around on our two feet. If it’s uncomfortable just to look good, I don’t agree with that mentality. Of course, I’m trying to create the best-looking product, but there’s also a lot of things we experience in our day-to-day lives.
That’s why I put four zipper pockets on our shorts. Me personally, I lose a bunch of stuff, so I wanted a pocket here for this, another pocket there for that. I camp a lot, so I’m outside a lot, and through my experiences doing the things I love, I found that four pockets are better than two. It’s about function. I think, how would I want this product to wear? How would I think the consumer wants this product to wear? It’s just about everything having a deep intention, everything has a specific purpose. And that purpose is day-to-day life and what I believe our community needs.
Kyle – I think it builds off a core. When we were sitting at the airport the other day, I literally took my wireless iPhone case and put it in the shorts with the four pockets and was like, “This is perfect.” It’s the purest way we could use that pocket on these shorts. But when you look at it from the perspective of how we build and develop new products, it all comes from that core. If you look at any product, at any point, you could mix them all together; whether it’s an outfit or just combining product A with product B in a way that makes functional sense and doesn’t feel over the top.
Some things might not seem like they’re intended to go together, but when you zoom out and see the bigger picture, everything ends up working together. The more we can stick to that, the better. You could say a carabiner is trendy, and I totally agree. We could do a lot of things that are trendy in a really easy way, but they might not make sense when we look back at it from our core perspective.
So, as long as it aligns with that core and connects with everything we’ve already done, that’s when we look at it and think, “Okay, this makes sense.” We’re not doing it just for the sake of it; we’re doing it because it fits with everything we’ve built and attaches itself to that. It’s like a weird family tree of products. If something doesn’t feel like it would be the next branch on that tree, we’re quick to cut it off and not pursue it.
Can you share how the team came together?
Jared – So this is a crazy point. I’ll go back to when I was 15 or something like that. Kyle used to work at the Apple store at this local mall. I’ve always loved streetwear and shoes, but Kyle was that guy in the city. He had the mags, he had all the shoes, it was all inspiration for me. I remember him doing colours, and I remember him moving to LA and following his journey. He never knew this, but I was following his journey and watching how he did it. So, I was always loosely inspired by what he was doing, but I wasn’t taking action or doing it myself.
Then, I think I started posting some Water When Dry stuff, and Kyle was one of the first 15 people in the original Discord, back in 2022 or 2023, something like that. We chopped it up, and the brand kind of took a little hiatus between 2022 and 2023, I don’t know, maybe about a year. Then after that, we relaunched a product in March of this last year, and he finally hit me up and was like, “Hey man, I’ve been doing some thinking. I really want to join this and I love what you’re doing.” I was like, “Bro, you don’t even know, this is a full-circle moment for me. I’ve been looking at your stuff my whole life. This is sick.” And now it’s just like, “Oh, he’s just Kyle now. He just gets annoyed with me.”
Kyle – It’s funny because I remember, thank you, by the way, I remember a lot of that. I had my own journey, moved around, tried different brands, and when I saw him first starting Water and Dry, I was actually in the process of working on another project with a friend. Honestly, I think we launched at the exact same time, and I’d been going at it for about a month before I saw him post about Water and Dry. The second I saw him make the first post, I was like, “Bro, I would drop everything I’m doing right now and go work with this guy.” I just saw it from day one. I was like, I see the vision, I see the idea, the concept to me is incredible, and the product speaks for itself, everything made sense.
I think we both had to go through our journeys a little more to get to the point where it crossed in the middle. I was dating a girl at the time, I think it was literally New Year’s Day or right around there, and I was like, “Man, I feel like I’ve got my life in line a little bit, and I feel like I’ve kind of got a grasp on what I’m doing in life, but I’ve got this hunger to add a little more.” I hit Jay up and I was like, “Yo, if you need someone, if you’re open to some help or to bring someone on, I’m here, bro. I don’t care if it’s just texting me for advice or if it’s you running this thing to the moon with me: Whatever it may be, I’m here and I want to help. I want to make myself available.”
And, I mean, that was, I don’t know, 11 months ago now, and we’ve been on probably the wildest 11-month ride of my personal life. Something I’m super grateful for. I could never repay him for the opportunity to do this. It’s been an incredible ride, and I’m super blessed to have him in the corner running the shop because he’s as talented as it gets. Sometimes I’ve got to remind him about it and make sure he stays on top of things and does all that kind of stuff. But I think we’re a great team, and it’s definitely exciting to see where it’s going to go from here.
Could you discuss some of the challenges you faced when starting Water When Dry?
Jared – Alright, so there’s two things. One’s more of an ego thing, the other’s more production. So, it was really just like, this is my baby. I can’t say it enough. And it was just about giving up the reins, releasing it, and understanding that it’s in good hands with other people, not just myself. That was the hardest thing for me. Me and Kyle butted heads about it. I butted heads with other business partners about it, and it was just that moment where I was like, “You know what? We’ve got good people. That’s that.” It was just me trusting my people a little more.
And then secondly, production. The things that you don’t get told when you’re starting a brand and dealing with manufacturing, and then dealing with import duty taxes that just come out of nowhere, and you owe $2,000 that you weren’t expecting. So, if you’re not blessed and don’t have the resources to think on your feet and have people that help you in those moments, it’s a really tough game. That’s the biggest thing for me, just the unexpected things that no one tells you until you have to go through them and learn them for yourself. There’s really no way around it either. I could sit here all day and talk to you, make sure you look out for this, make sure you look out for that. But until you feel it, and you actually take action and figure out the solutions for it, I don’t believe there’s any way around it. So, it’s tough.
Kyle – I hate to phrase it like this, but there’s a lot of things they leave out of the pamphlet when you’re starting a brand, and when you find out about them, it really hurts, right? It really hurts. You listen to some of the great brand founders, like Bobby Hundreds, guys like that, and they say there are days when the brand seems like it could be over in that exact moment. You could go from a hundred to zero, not even overnight, but in an hour, because things like that happen. We talk a lot about how those are the things that take you from point A to point B to point C to Z, and you try to get through that. It really speaks to perseverance and just the desire to get to that point.
So many times, whether it’s brands we’ve had in the past, you hit those roadblocks and we’d be dead, it would just be like, “Nope, can’t do this.” You just have to move on. I know from an ego standpoint what Jared means when he talks about giving up the reins, but I think for me it’s the opposite. I’ve always been the number one guy in everything I’ve done. Coming into something and having someone be the number one guy, with such a clear vision and desire for what he wants to do, and learning to step back, I think we’ve butted heads only in the fact that we’re both just super passionate, dedicated people. At the end of the day, when you talk through things, you get to a result where it’s like, “Oh, we both wanted the best.”
I mention it to him all the time that when we have arguments, the only reason we have arguments is because we’re trying to take things from a nine to a 10. Sometimes that might be, “This doesn’t look great, we should do it this way.” Maybe we shouldn’t do this at this point in time. There are infinite reasons why we think something should or could go from a nine to a 10, but it’s just having that understanding, which I think we’ve gotten to a great place with. It’s respecting each other’s opinions, respecting the way things have to flow, and just trying to get to a spot that makes sense at the end of the day.
Enough other stuff is going on, with the tax and production, all that kind of stuff getting messed up along the way. For the two of us to just be able to be on the same page, and if one of us isn’t feeling something, just be honest about it, accept it, it’s not personal, and just move on. That’s been a huge hurdle for us to get over. But now that we’re there, it just makes things so much easier.
How did this collection come about? Could you discuss some of the ideas around this?
Kyle : Okay, so it’s funny, I make this joke all the time behind the scenes. I think people think that we’re a lot more ahead of the game on some things in terms of planning and execution and conceptual stuff. But some stuff, whether it’s this or other drops, happen in the 29th day at the 23rd hour and the 59th minute. It’s like we’ve known we wanted to do it, but how do we push this from a marketing standpoint?
When we look at the watercolor pack, a lot of what we do relies on the wash. We know that we could just go buy blank tees that fit the style and weight we want and print on them. But we think it’s a much better process to go through the entire production process, picking material, deciding what we want, and going through that unique WWD washing process.
So when we looked at the watercolour pack, I think deciding to go with the watercolour branding made sense because every shirt’s a little different. The wash on this one is a little bit different than on this one, and that’s true for all of our shirts. That’s true for the terracotta, the kiwi, and everything we’ve done because of the way we choose to wash them and the process we go through. From a branding standpoint, this set specifically speaks to the design style and the way we see watercolour as a very fluid, working dynamic process, much like how you would paint with it.
When we saw it on the tees and looked at the wash, it was just an instant “this is it.” The absolute honest answer to that, though, is that Jared was like, “What do you think about this?” And I was like, “Let me write some copy up really quick.” And it was just like, bam, copy, “This is watercolour, ship it.” That’s where it’s at.So, sometimes it’s very, very thought-out, and sometimes we just roll with it at the last minute, and things just make sense. I don’t think we ever want to hide that because that’s the reality of how we operate. Sometimes we’re just keeping the cogs moving, and sometimes it’s intentional, but sometimes it’s just what makes sense when we’re at the one-yard line.
Jared – It’s really a mix of all those experiences. I use the pants myself, and we’ve got some joggers coming out soon. I always laugh about it because I own a North Face tent, and that actually inspired the design for the pants, it’s the same tent I love camping in. My goal is to create pieces that resonate with people who enjoy the same things I do, camping, hiking, and exploring the outdoors. Being in Florida, I spend a lot of time around the natural springs and in the woods, drawing inspiration directly from the environment.
But beyond that, the use case of the product is the most important thing. Functionality comes first, from the colors to the overall design. Like I said, the North Face tent was a huge inspiration, but that comes from actually living in those moments, being outside, experiencing nature, and then creating products for people who share that lifestyle.
Have you got any of the collections in the works?
Jared – I try to live and develop the brand with no real expectations. Obviously, we have plans and stuff. It’s just so unknown, really. There’s so many things I do want to say, like, “Oh, we want a shoe collab, we want this, we want that.” I think what happens now for us is just doing just a little bit more as far as opening ourselves up, me as myself, Kyle as himself, and the rest of the people in our brand as themselves, to show off our personalities. That was something that happened at ComplexCon that I think was a huge win for us because now it gave me the comfort of knowing that I do fit in this space. I can make it happen in this space. That was the coolest thing for me.
But as far as where we’re going, it’s day by day. We’re going to continue to drop dope product regardless. We’re sampling six products a month. We’re doing a drop every month, so time’s only going to be the thing that’s going to tell us where we’re going. I can’t tell you where we’re going. We’re just going to keep dropping dope shit, to be honest with you.
Kyle – I think we live on two timelines, and I say we as a whole. I think there’s exactly what Jay described, where it’s like the short term, living in the moment. We know that we have to be shortsighted in some things. It just makes sense. We have the ability, we’re on track right now where we’re doing our best to release product every three weeks, which is an incredible task for us as a new brand, trying to figure things out, actively sampling things. We don’t really have product like baked out months in advance, so to release product every three weeks at this point has been a real test in staying on task and staying on top of it.
Now, with that being said, I think there are longer-term plans we could talk about. We have ideas for offset brands like Roseberry, which is a fictitious town that we’ve been working on for a long time, and just how we can release product in that way, and different ideas that we’ve had along the way. We just left ComplexCon with our chain stitch tee, our jogger pants, over pants, new hoodies. We have sweats coming. There are a number of things that are in the works, women’s lines, things like that. It’s just so hard. We really live on two timelines, where it’s one that is very, very in the moment, making sure that at any point in time we can hit that three-week turnaround time. Jay’s over here shipping things like same-day or next-day. Most times it’s very customer-service focused, very community-focused. But then on the product side, we’re really, really trying to stay on top of it.
We could release a product once every two months, or we could do things quarterly, like maybe we do two releases per season, whatever we want to do. I think we’ve really chosen to challenge ourselves and put our best effort forward in trying to release product on this very, very short timeline. We don’t know if that’s the way to go about it. We don’t know if that’s the best way to do things at any point in time. We’ve just decided that that’s the way that we want to do things.
We close our shop every night at 8:00 PM. We open at the next morning at 8:00 AM or 10:00 AM. People hate that. We get so much heat for the shop being closed half the day. We have people on our team. who we literally fight for it every single time we’re on a call, every single time we see someone in person. We fight for it daily. We believe it so strongly, and I think that we just have this undiscussed core set of values where it’s just like, now we’re going to release product every three weeks. We’re going to close our shop half of the day, like a regular retail store, and if it doesn’t work for us, at least we know we stuck to something that we truly believe in and that we truly think is best for the place that we’re trying to build. And if it’s not, at the end of the day, shit, at least we tried, right? At least we did it the way that we felt was best.
Finally, how do you envision the evolution of water when dry?
Jared : Philanthropy, bro, to literally Water when dry. I want to help people that aren’t able to help themselves. Man, it kills me that there’s so many people struggling and the world is chaos in a way. We see it, but it’s also good, but there’s a lot of people that don’t live in that good, whether it’s appliances, whether it’s product. I want to do it all, but the core message behind it is that I’d give all of this up to take away pain from people.
Kyle – My singular goal is very clear and maybe it’s not like a brand goal as much as it’s just a personal goal and it’s really to make sure that whatever Jay wants to do and wherever he wants to take this, he has the full backing of the people around him to be as successful as he would like this to be. I decided a long time ago when I joined on, this is his ship. I’m just along for the ride and anything he needs to be able to succeed that he thinks I can help with. I’m fully on board. I think it’s so hard to say.
We try to live so in the moment that sometimes it’s even hard to believe that where we are is where we are, so some days being like, Hey, down the road is really far, and we talk about it from a time standpoint. We spend a lot of time talking about, okay, a year from now, where are we at three years from now, five years. I know everyone says it, but it’s one of those things where if we can be here 15, 30 years from now, I think that’s a sign that we did something right along the way, and I think it’s a sign that knowing the person that he is, knowing who I am and knowing the people that are around us, I think it’s very easy for me to believe and understand that whatever is the right thing that we had to do to get to that point meant that we did a lot of right and a lot of good along the way to support it.
I think the more that we can do that, the more that we can stick to that. I think we’re in a really good place to hold each other accountable, to really make sure that that’s how things go and that we’re not just doing things because financially it makes more sense or because it’s the easy way out. At any point, we want to do things the right way and we want to do things in a way that when we put our heads on the pillow at night that we feel really good about, whether it’s the price of product or it’s the way that we make product or the way that we deliver product. I think all of those things kind of work in tandem to make sure that if we can do something better, if we can do something right or if we can do something good in the very literal definitions of those words, I think that’s where we want to go and we’ve said it before, but we’re just a couple of kids from Massachusetts trying to make the world a better place and I think the more that we can stay to that, I think the better that we’ll be in the long run.