Wear Your Music
Wear Your Music is a modern story. Boy meets girl online — through a Craigslist post,
but not that kind of Craiglist post. This boy and this girl aren’t looking for
love but they are looking for purpose. When Steve Bernstein and Hannah Garrison
meet, they establish almost immediate mutual admiration. So much so that they
agree to found their company, Wear Your Music, the very same day.
Later will come Keith Richards, John Mayer, and nearly 200 other guitar
heroes; later they will scrape together some half a million dollars — one
guitar string bracelet at a time — and give it all to charity. But on this day
back in 2006, there is just the young,
pull-no-punches Hannah Garrison, who sits down across the desk from
longstanding magazine editor and Wall Street executive Steve Bernstein. He is
wearing a suit, and she is wearing blue jeans. She says, “Hi, I’m Hannah. Very
nice to meet you.”
Then working as publisher of Relix Magazine, Steve was plotting a way to
sell more ads to guitar string companies. He thought that it would help if he
could somehow encourage even non-guitarists to buy strings, so he’d posted the
Craigslist ad offering money in exchange for the best idea for repurposing
guitar strings. Within three hours, 160 responses appeared in his inbox. One of
these was from Hannah, who was living nearby and happened to be trolling the
classifieds on Craigslist.
When Hannah ran across Steve’s ad, she thought immediately of the elaborate
guitar string bracelets she’d made for friends for years. A trained jeweler,
she’d since graduated onto other jewelry-making ventures but her interest was
piqued. And, having just returned from a year spent apprenticing with a jeweler
in Mexico, she had no job at the time. So she emailed Steve.
“As soon as I read Hannah’s response, I said, ‘That’s it’ and I shut down the ad,” says Steve. “She came over and an hour later we set up the company.”
Together Steve and Hannah outlined the philosophy that still guides the company today — one that focuses on donating most of the profits to charities, and that buoys the green movement by recycling terrific amounts of guitar strings. Both Hannah and Steve donate their time to the company (as do most of the part-time employees)
Durable, dynamic, and surprisingly chic, the product has taken off not only because of the company’s noble accomplishments but also because of the bracelets’ universal, unisex appeal.
Reflecting on the enormous success of Wear Your Music, both Hannah and Steve say that’s what happens when you act on a really good, simple idea.
