Outside of the classroom, some students have passions for different activities that allow them to explore their interests. For junior William Dupont, it began with a creative moment in Photoshop and turned into the beginning of Racing Focus, his motorsports enthusiast apparel brand that combines his love for cars, racing, and fashion. 

William takes inspiration from vintage car clothing, but the creativity aspect comes natural to him. First, he comes up with an idea and then he sits down in Photoshop to execute the design on a t-shirt. He tests a variety of different designs and templates, to see what works and what doesn’t. 

“Some things look good in your head, but sometimes it doesn’t look the best on a t-shirt,” said William. 

Currently, Racing Focus has a variety of products including t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, posters, phone cases, and stickers. The designs range from phrases such as “thank you for racing with us” to other apparel items with different cars displayed. His customer base consists of people that are fans of racing and car culture. Additionally, there is a high demand for clothing in the market of vintage-style car clothing. 

He used Shopify to help him get the website up, and as a computer science student, he self-taught himself a lot of the coding. It took him about a week to make the website, but he has made modifications to it, putting in some of his own code so it no longer looks like a Shopify template. 

He enjoys coding, design, and motorsport so it doesn’t feel like dreadful work for him. His passion for clothing design allows him to make time for it. School always comes first, but once he gets his schoolwork done, it is always the next thing that he does. 

In a two-week period he gets approximately 800 website visits. His plan for the future is to grow his social media and be able to market the brand. He also hopes to work with Google in the future, and eventually trademark the brand once he gets his name out into the world.