Confessions

Dear tired millennial,

Let's get this out of the way: The Bare Minimum Club did not start as a bare minimum effort.

The first designs were... clinical. Corporate, even. Blocky fonts, black and white, "Unofficial Brain Cell Provider" energy, funny, sure, but not you. I don't work in a corporate world, so wearing corporate-coded burnout jokes felt like cosplay. The whole thing felt borrowed.

The actual misprint. Still no refund.

Then the printer sent my first sample back with two designs smashed into one shirt. I emailed. Nobody replied. I chalked it up as a loss and kept going, apparently that's the club motto now too.

Still corporate-coded, but this is where it clicked.

Somewhere in the reshuffle, trying to fix "Circling Back (to Bed)" for the fortieth time, I figured out what was actually wrong. This was never about being tired of a job. It's about being tired, period. Millennial-woman, hustle-culture, do-everything-always tired. I didn't want to laugh at corporate fatigue. I wanted to be validated for doing less and not feeling guilty about it.

So I stopped designing for an audience and started designing for myself. Turns out you were exactly who I had in mind anyway, which either makes us both very on-brand or deeply unqualified to run a business. Jury's out.

Me, "doing the bare minimum."

Here's the irony nobody warned me about: running the Bare Minimum Club takes anything but the bare minimum. I build this around a full-time job, in the hours most people spend recovering from theirs. The goal is simple: a bit of financial freedom for my family, and maybe one day, this becomes the job. Not quite the bare minimum yet. Working on it.

Doing the bare minimum, on purpose,
Sirley
Founder, The Bare Minimum Club