Brand introduction

What Sophos Is

Sophos is the Greek word for wise. Socrates refused it. He called himself philosophos instead, a lover of wisdom, because he had noticed that the men who accepted the first title stopped moving.

That's the whole idea. The name is a reminder that we haven't arrived.

My name is Jordan Newberry. I started this because I spent a stretch of years angry, anxious, and without direction, and I didn't find my way out through encouragement. I found it in old books. The Stoics first, then Jung, then scripture I'd grown up around and never actually read, then Taoism, then the existentialists, who were the only ones willing to say plainly that nobody is coming.

None of it was new. That was what surprised me. Every problem I thought was mine had already been described, precisely, by someone dead for two thousand years, and described better than I could manage.

I wrote it down anyway. That became The Inner Mind. It took seven versions and it isn't finished being wrong.

What I found there is uncomfortable and I'm not going to soften it: most of what was wrong with me was made by me. Not all of it. Some things are done to you and no philosophy makes that fair. But the part I kept filing under circumstance turned out to be maintenance, repetitions I'd chosen without noticing I was choosing, then defended for years, because examining them would have cost more than complaining did.

That's the claim this brand rests on. If it isn't true, none of the rest matters.

Sophos is what came out of it. Every graphic is a sentence I needed to be able to see. Memento mori, because it stops the drifting. The shadow, because what you refuse to look at operates without supervision. Suffering, because it holds keys and nothing else does. Wisdom deserves to be shared, which is on the logo, and which means the man who hoards it is holding a dead thing.

These aren't affirmations. Several of them are unpleasant. A shirt that says you can't escape death isn't trying to make your day better, it's trying to make your day accurate, which is a different service and a more useful one.

I don't have a system to sell you. I have a set of old ideas that worked on me, printed on clothes I wear myself, and a blog where I think through them in public and am sometimes wrong in front of everybody.

If it's useful, take it. It was never mine.

— Jordan

Sophos Clothing operates under Inner Mind Collaborative LLC in Cincinnati, Ohio.