Dear Person Behind Me is a family owned brand. We make the original Dear Person Behind Me hoodie, and everything we sell exists for one reason: to say something to a stranger that most of us think and almost never say out loud.
It started with a line I needed to hear
Before it was a brand, it was a sentence I wanted somebody to say to me.
A few years ago I was going through the hardest stretch of my life. None of it was visible. I went to work. I stood in the same grocery line as everyone else. I answered "good, you?" the way everyone does. What I remember most clearly is how easy it is to be completely invisible in a room full of people who would have helped if they had known.
The idea that turned into this brand was small, and a little embarrassing to admit. I wished the person ahead of me in line would turn around and tell me the world was better with me in it. Nobody was ever going to do that. So I put the words on the back of a hoodie and let them do it instead.
That is the entire origin. There is no focus group behind it and no invented tragedy. Just one person who needed the message first.
What it says
Across the back, where the people behind you can read it: "Dear person behind me, the world is a better place with you in it. Love, the person in front of you."
Across the front, where you can read it every time you pull it over your head: "You are enough."
Two audiences, one garment. The back is a gift to a stranger who will never say thank you. The front is for you, and it is the part most people tell us they did not expect to need.
The message travels further than the person wearing it. In a checkout line, at a school pickup, at an airport gate, somebody reads it over a shoulder, and something in their afternoon shifts a few degrees. They will not mention it. You will not know it happened. It happens anyway.
We are the original
Dear Person Behind Me is where this design came from. The words, the placement on the back, the front line, the whole idea of aiming a message at the person standing behind you. We wrote it, we printed it, and we have been shipping it from this store ever since.
Since then, the design has been copied a great many times. That is a strange thing to feel proud and sick about at the same time, and both are true.
Made to order, on purpose
Nothing in this store exists before you order it.
Your order is printed for you specifically, after you place it. That is slower and more expensive than the alternative, which is to guess what will sell, print thousands of units in advance, and burn or bury whatever does not move. The apparel industry destroys an enormous amount of unsold clothing every year. We would rather not be part of that number.
Made to order also means we can be genuinely careful about what goes into it. We choose the blanks ourselves, we test them, and we drop the ones that pill, shrink strangely, or lose their print after a few washes. A hoodie carrying this message needs to survive being worn constantly, because that is exactly what people do with it.
Printed close to you
Made to order usually means slow. It does not have to.
We work with production facilities on multiple continents, and your order is routed to the one nearest you. A customer in Texas is not waiting on a package crossing an ocean. Neither is a customer in Germany or Australia. It arrives faster, it clears customs less often, and every order travels a fraction of the distance it otherwise would, which matters to us for reasons that have nothing to do with speed.
Why we chose the harder version
All of this costs us margin. A great deal of it.
Making each piece individually, on quality blanks, close to the customer, with a real person answering the email afterwards, is far more expensive than buying finished garments in bulk from an anonymous warehouse and shipping them out in plastic bags. We know precisely how much thinner our margins are than the alternative. We looked at the numbers and chose this anyway.
The mission is worth more to us than the spread. A message about strangers deserving kindness lands very badly on a garment that falls apart in a month.
You are on the official store
Every week we receive messages from people who never bought anything from us.
They are three months into waiting for an order. Or the print cracked after two washes. Or the size that arrived is not the size on the label, and nobody is answering their emails. They searched the words from the hoodie, found this store, and reasonably assumed we were the ones who sold it to them.
We reply to every single one of those messages. It is the worst part of our week, because there is nothing we can do. We cannot refund an order we never received or reship a garment we never made. We can only tell someone, gently, that they bought it somewhere else.
So the one useful thing we can do is be clear: dear-person-behind-me.com is the original Dear Person Behind Me, and this is the only store we run.
We have never invented a story to sell a hoodie. The one at the top of this page is the only story we have, and it is mine.
What we actually make
The Dear Person Behind Me hoodie is where it began and still the piece most people come for. Around it there is now a full line of mental health apparel and kindness focused pieces, including tees, crewnecks, long sleeves, caps, totes, and mugs, in the colours our customers actually keep asking for.
One last thing
Somebody standing behind you in a line today is having a much harder time than they are letting on. You will never know which one, and they will never tell you.
That is the entire reason the words are on the back.
Thank you for being here, and for buying from the people who started it.
Contact Us
We’re here to help! If you have any questions, concerns, or just want to share your story, feel free to reach out to us. Our dedicated customer service team is ready to assist you.
You can contact us by email or on Instagram.
Thank you for visiting Dear Person Behind Me. Together, we can make the world a kinder place, one message at a time.