The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
— Psalm 118:22
A world full of noise
It has rarely been harder to know what to believe. Every day brings a new certainty that contradicts yesterday's, delivered with total confidence and forgotten within a week. People are told to find their own truth and then left alone to carry it.
Against all of that, faith is not a small thing to hold. It takes something to say plainly that you believe, and to keep saying it when the culture around you shrugs.
We think that deserves to be worn with pride rather than kept quietly to yourself.
Why the name
A cornerstone is the first stone set at the corner of a building. Every stone laid after it takes its line from that one. Set it right and the whole structure holds. Set it wrong and nothing above it is true.
That is the image Scripture uses for Christ, and it is the idea this company is built on. In a world of shifting ground, something has to be fixed. Everything else takes its line from that.
Carrying the word further
A shirt is a small thing. But it goes places a sermon doesn't — the gym, the supermarket queue, the school gate, the office. Someone reads a line of Scripture on a Tuesday afternoon who would never open a Bible, and it stays with them.
That is most of what we're doing here. Putting the word somewhere it will be seen, in a form people actually want to wear.
Something to recognise each other by
Faith is not meant to be carried alone. One of the oldest instincts in the church is the sign that says I am one too — the fish scratched into a wall, the cross worn under a collar, the symbol that turns a stranger into a brother.
We'd like our work to do a little of that. A design someone spots across a room. A conversation that starts because of a graphic on a hoodie. Small connections between people who might otherwise have walked past each other.
A community is built the same way a wall is: one stone at a time, all of them lined up on the same corner.
What we make
Apparel, art prints, mugs and jewellery, across eight visual traditions — modern, botanical, classical sacred, oil painting, Japanese, Japanese neon, Americana and abstract.
Different hands, different centuries, same foundation. The church has always made things, and every generation used the visual language of its own time to carry something that doesn't change. Ours is no different.
Made only when it's wanted
Every piece is printed after you order it. Nothing is mass-produced in advance, nothing is warehoused, and nothing is destroyed at the end of a season because it didn't sell.
The clothing industry produces enormous quantities that are never worn and eventually burned or buried. We find that difficult to square with the instruction given in the first pages of Scripture — to tend the garden and keep it. Printing to order means we make one of a thing because one person wanted it.
It is slower. Your order takes a few extra days. We think that's a fair trade for not producing waste on purpose.
Scripture quotations are taken from the World English Bible, British Edition.
Christ Cornerstone Co.
ChristCornerstoneCo@outlook.com