A trip to New York City was the inspiration for Dualta Jones and Francesca Griffin to set up an Irish streetwear brand. "We felt that there was a lack of interesting tshirts available here after coming home from New York and seeing the streetwear scene they have," says Dualta.

"At first we were pretty innocent about the whole thing. We made up this catalogue, got it printed in one of those photo stores and went around the “street” stores in Dublin and tried selling stuff from that, without ever having printed anything. So as you can imagine that didn’t go down so well, but the manager in the now closed Savage, liked the designs and seemed to like our boldness. So he told us to print some of the designs and we could get some stuff in the store."

Launching a streetwear brand in Ireland sounds like a tricky market at the moment because according to Dualta, "People want to support Irish brands, but still tend to gravitate toward the cheaper mass produced stuff. We don't compete with that. Instead we market ourselves as producing hand printed, limited edition pieces."

Dublin's ever expanding number of markets are a good opportunity to meet appreciative customers and push the limited edition nature of the brand's product. "When you do a show or market and everyone wants one of your sold out tees you have to explain the whole limited edition idea. But then you hope that the other tee they were looking at will jump out at them a bit more because next time, you never know that tshirt might be gone too!

With Francesca's background in Fashion design and Dualta's graffiti background, their designs draw influence from both graffiti and street art though that is getting flogged to death by everyone right now thinks Dualta. They also draw inspiration from movies, games, toys they grew up with, fashion trends and even Dublin itself.

Project A Apparel also have a conscientiousnes ethos when it comes to production and sourcing their garments as the founder Dualta explains, "We source all our tees from Continental. We found after some trial and error that they had the best quality. This was something that meant a lot to us. We want to put the highest quality into every part of the process. Earth positive tees are carbon neutral and fair trade. No machines at all are used in the process so they are very hand printed. Even the setup was finely crafted at home. Finely may be pushing it but its all hand printed. Captain Planet would be proud."

Check it: projectaapparel.storenvy.com