We recently connected with Melvin & Javee Medina and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Melvin & Javee thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s jump to the end – what do you want to be remembered for?

Wika Designs is two-fold small business. We initially started Wika Designs as a clothing brand. Our mission is to create an apparel brand that inspires hope through words and design. It is our goal for our brand to be “sweet to the soul & healing to the bones”. While this part of our business is still in development, we have a service side to our business which seeks to serve our community by offering custom print apparel through screen printing, embroidery, and laser engraving of promotional products.

The legacy we hope to build is for our children. We want to mentor them through the process of owning a small business. Both Melvin & Javee have a background in customer service. It is through our experience in customer service that we learned how to go through the “extra mile” for our clients. We want our children to learn how it is to be serving someone. It is through service that we learn more about each other, learn about people and ultimately learn about our ourselves and how we can meet someone’s needs. While we do not know if our children will continue the business when they grow older, we would like for them to have learned with us business acumen, relational and communication skills.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Wika Designs officially began in 2022 after the pandemic and the need to find extra income for our family. However, the joy in creating apparel designs began in 2010 (unbeknownst to us at the time) with a laser printer, an iron, Gildan t-shirts and iron-on sheets from Michaels, and a love for sports gathering with family & friends during Manny Pacquiao fight nights.

It was at this time that showed us we loved making shirts for family & friends. We printed off images of the Pac-Man from the internet and ironed them on the shirts. We did not even think about profiting from it. We wanted to be identified together with love for our countryman Manny Pacquiao. It felt great to cheer him on while showing support by wearing his image on our shirts.

Melvin would say he is not very creative when it comes to designs. However, his strength is being able to learn something new in a short amount of time especially if it deals with a technological component. In addition, Melvin had aspirations of starting a small business. Javee is the creative one. Her initial thought about starting a craft business was on the side of greeting cards. Javee wanted to use recycled paper materials and re-package them using her creative skills in color, poetry and design. Meshing these two together was not very easy. And at the on-set at times was very explosive. While Melvin always looked out for their family’s station in life, Javee did not want to enter into business let alone the T-Shirt industry. It was just something she had not envisioned for herself. As humans, we do not really want to dive into the unknown.

Melvin began to learn more about the T-Shirt printing industry. We are always grateful to the social-media influencers who chose to pass on the knowledge and not gate-keep. It is from them that we have learned from all their hard work and years of being in this business. Melvin spent countless hours in research and online learning and came to the conclusion that we could do it as well if we invest in a few machines.

Since information is attainable in this day and age, we want to set our business apart from others. Our clothing brand is still in development but we want our brand to encourage others. We choose words and design to be the forefront of our brand. Our service is also unique. We have not employed a marketing specialist. Instead, we chose to hit the pavement and network. 2023 was the year we did the hard work of getting our services out there in marketing events, attending business mixers, and boldly starting conversations with business owners on how we can be of service to them. We also have used the benefit (and zero expense) of using social media as a marketing tool. We have a regular segment on our social media called “Appreciation Post”. A majority of our projects do come from verbal recommendations. However, we are not content creators. We acknowledge those who have this business and continue to create content online. For our business, we chose not to go into content creating but we are also not saying it is possible in the future. But at this time you will know about our brand & business online if you follow us on social media. As Wika Designs, we are most proud of providing quality service to each and everyone of our projects in a reasonable timeframe. We tend to be perfectionist in this way that if something is off just by a hair we do not feel confident in giving the product to our client.

If you are wondering about the name WIKA {pronunciation WE-KUH), it means “language” in Tagalog. We chose the name WIKA because fashion and creative design is a universal language. We all want to be inspired by words or aesthetically appealing designs and it is through this we try to achieve in our clothing and the service we give.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

We believe that doing the hard work of getting into networking, social and market events helped build our reputation. We do not pay for social media or website production. We simply rely on our communication skills in person and that of our fingertips. We realize that this may take time and sometimes we as people can get impatient wanting to see results immediately. However, we find that as we cultivate and foster our relationships with our clients in-person or online, we get the valued recommendations through those that have seen our work or have been a client. That to us is more valuable than instant growth. We enjoy talking to our clients, engaging with them, and seeing what their interests are. One person asked us at a marketing event “Why should we go with you” and we answered because we are local, small and we give attention to our clients. You do not get that in big businesses. In the beginning of the business we shied away from questions like these, but having 2 years under our belt as a small business and over 10+ years of customer service we can confidently answer pointed questions like those. Every year we grow and we become more confident. These are small things we value and help build the foundations of our business.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We recognize the value of social media in our time right now. Although we are not focused on growing our presence in social media, we do use it for the purposes of showcasing our business through the projects we encounter and for connecting with our audience. We want to show on a daily basis how we go about creating and also for how our followers can know us. We also show our connections. This is the most fun for us because we are slowly seeing how we are connected to some local businesses. We can also see how our clients recommend us to other people and or businesses. We also enjoy giving our followers how we see the business through our eyes. Most importantly, our appreciation post and shout-outs give us the determination to go on. We look at these past post and tell ourselves “this is an example of someone who believed”. At times we do hit a slump. Some months are better than others. It is at that time we go to our social media and look back and remind ourselves. Besides, social media is the best way to promote a business with $0. The T-Shirt industry right now is saturated with so many influencers and most of them will tell us to use social media. Whether you use the ad or use the free tools, it can definitely help in the business. The one word we can share about social media is “authenticity” which is actually a part of our acronym WIKA. Words Inspiring Kinship & Authenticity. The best part of using social media is authenticity. We can share the best and struggles of our business and this can help the audience relate.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wikadesigns.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wika.designs/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wikadesigns1624
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/wika-designs-gaithersburg