Old Try

Old Try is a art and apparel brand featuring a sense of place and the things that remind us of home (with a heavy focus in the American South). Founded in 2012 by Micah and Marianna Whitson, Old Try is now operated out of Almost Heaven, West Virginia by Kelli Steele and her husband Jeff Brown. Though my wife had lived in London and Manhattan, I’d never lived North of the Mason-Dixon line. So in ’0

7, we packed up the car and headed North. Like other Ex-Pat Southerners who had pangs of being away from home, I started thinking more about the South. About our collective pasts and our undetermined futures. And much to my surprise, I wanted to get back. After the Alabama tornadoes in April of '11, I just couldn't help expressing my broken heart for my smashed state. I saw the helicopter footage of those thinned forests and broken towns. Places I knew well were being broadcast on the television a thousand miles away, and I didn’t have one neighbor who knew those places like I did. I spent a good deal of time living in Mississippi, and Faulkner said to write what you know. Old Try started that way. By writing and designing Southern things for folks who lived in and out of the South. Things that connect people to a place they go to in their dreams, or a place they could never convince themselves to leave. We spent six winters in Boston and then took a sabbatical to have our daughter in North Carolina. Where her mom was born and where her mom was born and where her mom was born. Now we're back in New England. That’s where our son was born. And we carry with us those memories of being back home, and being home. And that’s just what will keep driving us to make things that can take y’all there, whether you’re living in the South or not.