Mean Hugs Club started with one guy who's been getting folded, choked, and cross-faced since 2011 - BJJ, wrestling, and pretty much every other grappling sport that involves consenting to have your limbs bent the wrong way. Over a decade deep in this community, I'd tried on a lot of gym merch and never found anything that actually sounded like us. None of it sounded like the group chat after a hard training session.
So I started making designs I actually wanted to wear - dry, a little mean, and only funny if you've actually been there.
Founded in 2025, Mean Hugs Club makes unisex tees for people who understand that showing up to open mat is basically consenting to being folded like laundry by a 16-year-old blue belt, and that this is somehow still the best part of your week.
Clothing says something about you. Ours just says very specific things - the kind that only land if you know exactly what a "Kimura", "Darce", "Buggy" and "Mother's Milk" actually feels like from the wrong end of it. Self-expression, to us, isn't a slogan - it's a shirt that only our community will fully get, and that's the whole point.
We take the quality seriously too! Heavyweight cotton that can survive the wash cycle better than your ego survived that last roll, cuts that fit whether you're built like a lightweight or you eat lightweights for breakfast.
We want to bring the mats' best-kept inside jokes to your closet - the stuff that only makes sense if you've tapped to a move you literally drilled that same morning. Because the people who love this sport deserve to laugh about it as much as they suffer for it, and to wear something that actually looks like they belong there.
As we grow, that's still the whole plan: good tees, good jokes, and the kind of specificity that makes a stranger at another gym clock you as one of their own.