Industry Fashion Design Area served Worldwide Type of business Private | Headquarters San Diego, U.S. Website www.jinx.com | |
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Jinx, stylized as J!NX, is a San Diego, California-based clothing line started by Sean Gailey and Tim Norris in 1999 that creates video game-themed apparel.
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Early History
Jinx was started as a home business in 1999 by two web developers: Sean Gailey and Tim Norris. The company produced T-shirts designed by Gailey on the theme of hacker culture. Though the enterprise doubled in size in the first year, the company remained a side-project of the two founders until 2003, when they partnered with Jason Kraus and decided to work full-time, using video game themes for the majority of their pieces. The following year the company moved out of Gailey's bedroom and into their first office. Gailey describes the multiple themes that Jinx uses in its apparel as including, "video games, art, geek culture, Internet memes, giant robots, gadgets and comics."
Jinx Clothing and Website
Jinx has worked with video game and other media companies through licensing deals to produce official product lines, including Blizzard Entertainment (the producer of the video games World of Warcraft, Diablo, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch and Starcraft), Minecraft, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. The company hires gamers as its employees in order to remain closely linked to the video gaming community.
Thefirm hosts an online community (with had over 600,000 users as of 2010) that, among other things, holds weekly trivia contests and a photo altering contest called Tweakfest. The site is also used as a sounding board for new design concepts, some submitted by the users themselves. There are also rewards programs associated with the community called Jinx Gold and Jinx Exp, whereby online participation leads to price discounts or other prizes.