In May 2025, the platform we hosted our website on for 9 years unexpectedly took us down. To learn the full story of our journey, our challenges, and our comeback, visit our new page: RIPT Revival
RIPT Apparel has always been more than a t-shirt company. It’s a community for artists and fans who geek out over comics, games, and pop culture. Every shirt tells a story, every design celebrates creativity, and every fan is part of the adventure. But in 2024, everything changed.
In July 2024, we sold RIPT to a Canadian competitor. The deal included a small down payment, with the rest to be paid over time. We trusted they’d honor our mission: the indie artist spirit, the community, the quality. They didn’t. Customer complaints started pouring in. Orders weren’t handled with care. The trust we built since 2009, one design, one fan, one epic fandom reference at a time, began to crack.
Then came the unthinkable. In May 2025, Shopify, our e-commerce home since 2016, deleted our entire store. Years of work. Thousands of artist designs. Every product, every review, every customer record gone overnight.
And if that wasn’t enough, our Facebook page with nearly 500,000 followers and Instagram with over 80,000 fans were also removed. Everything we’d built in the world of cosplay, comic conventions, and fandom communities was erased as if we never existed.
On June 4th, 2025, we got an email from the buyer.
They were walking away. No more payments.No transition. No staff. No assets.
Just the domain name, and the memories of what RIPT once was.
We were back to zero.
No manufacturing facility.
No developers.
No team.
Nothing.
But we’re from Detroit, and Detroit doesn’t fold.
We’ve been knocked down before, like a certain ragtag group of rebels against an empire, and every time, we come back stronger.
So we rolled up our sleeves, rebuilt from the ground up, and reignited the RIPT mission: to support independent artists and create designs that unite fandoms, from superhero sidekicks to pixelated heroes, and from wizarding worlds to space faring adventures.
We started over with grit, passion, and the belief that the people who truly built RIPT you would stand with us.
This isn’t just a comeback story.
It’s a statement.
You can take our store.
You can delete our pages.
But you can’t erase who we are, or what RIPT stands for.
To every artist, every fan, every person who ever wore a RIPT shirt while leveling up in D&D, catching ‘em all, or saving the galaxy:
We’re back.
We’re rebuilding.
And this time, we’re unstoppable.
Look, we’re not gonna sugarcoat this.
RIPT Apparel almost died. Like, really died. Not the dramatic movie kind where the hero gets back up in slow motion. More like the “everything you built over 16 years got nuked from orbit” kind.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s rewind.
July 2024. After running RIPT since 2009, we made a choice that seemed smart at the time: we sold the company to a Canadian competitor. Small down payment, the rest over time. Standard stuff. We trusted they’d get what RIPT was about—the indie artists, the daily designs, the community of fans who’d check the site at midnight just to see what dropped.
They didn’t get it.
Like, at all.
Customer complaints started rolling in almost immediately. Orders got messed up. The care we’d put into every design, every interaction since 2009? Gone. The trust we’d spent over a decade building—one geeky reference tee and one stoked customer at a time—started crumbling.
But hey, at least we still had the website, right?
May 2025. Shopify—our home since 2016—just… deleted us.
No warning. No “hey, there’s an issue.” Just gone.
Every. Single. Thing.
Sixteen years of artist designs. Thousands of products. Customer reviews. Order histories. That one shirt with the really clever Doctor Who/Parks and Rec mashup that everyone loved? Gone.
And because apparently the universe wasn’t done kicking us yet, our Facebook page (nearly 500,000 followers) and Instagram (over 80,000 fans) got wiped too. All those Comic-Con posts, cosplay features, community memes—erased like we never existed.
It felt like getting snapped by Thanos, except there were no Avengers coming to fix it.
June 4th, 2025.
We got an email from the buyer. Short and definitely not sweet.
They were walking away. No more payments. No transition plan. No manufacturing facility. No dev team. No staff. Nothing.
Just the domain name and a whole lot of “good luck with that.”
We were back to absolute zero. No infrastructure. No team. No products. No platform. Just three founders in Detroit staring at the smoldering crater where our company used to be.
Most people would’ve called it. Walked away. Started a food truck or something.
Here’s the thing about being from Detroit: we’ve been the underdog so many times, it’s basically our origin story. We know what it’s like to get counted out, written off, left for dead.
And we know how to come back.
So we did what any group of stubborn, pop-culture-obsessed entrepreneurs would do: we rolled up our sleeves and started rebuilding. From scratch. Again.
No store? We’d build a new one.
No team? We’d assemble one.
No artists? Well, actually, the artists never left. Because that’s the beautiful thing about real community—it doesn’t disappear when a platform does.
We rebuilt RIPT on one core belief: the people who truly made this company—the artists who trusted us with their work, the fans who wore our shirts to conventions and game nights, the community who made checking RIPT part of their daily routine—you all would be here when we came back.
It’s a middle finger to everyone who thought we were done.
You can delete our store. You can remove our social media. You can take away our infrastructure.
But you can’t erase 16 years of creativity. You can’t delete the relationships we’ve built with hundreds of artists. You can’t unprint the thousands of shirts that are living in closets and convention bags and laundry baskets around the world.
You can’t kill what RIPT actually is.
We’re back.
The same RIPT you knew—three daily designs, 24 hours only, gone forever after that. The same mission to support independent artists and give them a platform. The same pop culture mashups that make you do a double-take and think, “Wait, is that…?”
Same Detroit grit. Same community. Same obsessive attention to the designs you’ll actually want to wear while binge-watching your favorite show or rolling dice at D&D night.
Except now? We’re battle-tested. We’ve been knocked down, deleted, and left for dead.
And we came back anyway.
So whether you’ve been with us since 2009 or you’re just discovering us now, welcome to the next chapter. It’s going to be one hell of a story.
Let’s make some cool shirts.
