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What Started It All

Before Miva Collective was a brand with anything, there were only just ideas and concepts.
Random sketches. Hoodie samples. Logo attempts. Ideas that didn’t even know they were ideas yet.

The era from 2016 to 2020 is the part of the story most people never saw, the quiet years. The years when the brand wasn’t a brand. When it lived in notes, late-night sessions, half-finished designs, and pieces no one took seriously yet.

But looking back now, those early attempts were the blueprint.
Not visually, but spiritually.

This is the archive.

2016 — The First Spark

The earliest prototypes date back to 2016.

At the time, “Miva Collective” wasn’t even a solidified identity. It was a hobby. A side idea. Something sketched between a day job, producing music, DJing shows, learning the ropes of the local scene, and navigating early adulthood.

Pieces from this era were raw:

• early logo drafts
• centered text prints
• rough embroidery tests
• concepts that looked more like band merch than a brand

No one took it seriously, including us.

But something in it felt familiar.
Like a seed waiting for the right conditions.

2017 — Momentum Without Meaning

In 2017, the prototypes got cleaner, but the brand still had no soul.
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The designs improved:

• cleaner logo placements
• first headwear attempts
• early color palettes
• small-batch embroidery tests

Friends liked the samples.
Some even asked for pieces.
But internally, it still didn’t feel like the right time.

The identity wasn’t there.
It was like holding a puzzle with the middle pieces missing.

2018–2019 — Music Everywhere, Brand Nowhere

These years were all music.

Producing.
DJing.
Traveling back and forth between LA and the Bay.
Performing at car shows, local events, community spaces.
Meeting artists.
Networking deep in the scene.

The prototypes kept coming, but they stayed in boxes.
New ideas got sketched but never produced.
The logo existed but didn’t have meaning yet.

During these years, we saw the imbalance in the music world firsthand, the burnout, the pressure, the lack of wellness in creative spaces. But we didn’t have the language yet to tie that to the brand.

Everything was brewing beneath the surface.

2020 — The Shift

2020 changed everything.

COVID shut down the world.
Gigs stopped.
Studios closed.
Events evaporated.
Everyone was isolated with their thoughts.

And then the concussion happened.

Post-concussion syndrome forced a full stop.
No DJing.
No producing.
No loud environments.
No creative momentum.

It was one of the hardest personal years, but also the most revealing.

Because without music, without frequency, the brand’s purpose finally surfaced.

The prototypes from 2016–2019 suddenly made sense.

This wasn’t supposed to be a clothing line.
It was supposed to be a message.
A movement.
A creative space where music, wellness, and community could intersect.

The brand’s identity didn’t come from design, it came from recovery.

New Era

Most people only see the Winter 2020 drop as “the beginning.”
But the real beginning was here, in the trial years.

The archive matters because it represents:

• the years of wandering
• the years of internal struggle
• the years where the brand didn’t know what it was yet
• the missteps
• the drafts
• the self-doubt
• the life that shaped the intention

Every major brand has an era like this, Supreme’s pre-store skate years, Stüssy’s hand-drawn surfboard designs, The Hundreds' blog-era experiments.
This is ours.

A lot of the early pieces never made it to production.
Some weren’t good.
Some didn’t fit.
Some were ahead of their time.
But every single one pushed us closer to what Miva Collective eventually became.

The archive isn’t about clothing.
It’s about the identity forming in real time.

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What makes 2016–2020 special is that the brand lived in the background of life, not the foreground. It grew quietly, in the margins, during the nightlife hustle, during personal battles, during music burnout, during recovery, during rediscovery.

It wasn’t a business yet.
It wasn’t a strategy.
It wasn’t a marketing plan.

It was just the beginning of something that didn’t have words yet.

And sometimes, that’s how real brands start.

Archive in Retrospect

Now, looking back, there’s gratitude for that era.

Because if Winter 2020 was the birth,
then 2016–2020 was the incubation.

The time when Miva Collective wasn’t ready to be understood,
because we weren’t ready to understand it yet.

And now that the brand stands for mental health, community, music culture, youth advocacy, and creative balance, it’s clear that the archive wasn’t random.

It was forming us as much as we were forming it.

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