Wild and Formal

Creating Wild & Formal

In true Wild & Formal style, this business couldn’t be further from the archetypal entrepreneurial business venture. I was driving to the gym and saw a car with the sticker: ‘Jesus is my air bag’; having nearly crashed the car and needing Jesus as a result of laughing so hard, I thought we have jokes on car stickers …. why not on polo shirts? This is where our original name came from - Business at the Front Party at the back.

After coming up with the idea of a polo shirt with a joke on the back, I started thinking about what the logo should be. Major polo shirt brands have logos which rarely resonate with the people wearing them – ‘why do I want a large pony on my chest’, I regularly ask, ‘when I don’t like ponies?!’ So what do people resonate with … what makes a man go ‘ah yes that’s me!’. 

Here at Wild & Formal, we believe that nothing screams the quintessential man quite like a man sitting on a lawnmower with a beer – it's the stuff of dreams (anyone who says differently is quite simply lying to you). 

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The Wild & Formal Journey

The shirts were launched with much fanfare, people loved the logo, the quality of the polos and the story behind the shirt. However, it became clear that the joke on the back was prohibiting people from wearing the shirt to places such as the office. As unfortunately the office is a location most of us have to attend frequently, we launched the ‘Gentleman's Edition’. Our loyal customer base began purchasing as many of these as they could, and we realised that this was the new journey we needed to take the business on.

We will never, however, lose sight of where the original idea for Wild & Formal came from. We pay homage to the business’s inception everyday with our Instagram ‘Joke of the Day’. We will never stop cracking jokes and we encourage you to send any funny one liners into our relevant pages, as you never know, we might one day publish your joke!