About the Freezer Boys

Howdy, this is Michael Allen, cofounder of HOMESPUN.

I met Jack Durham (other cofounder) in the summer of 2017, just after we’d committed to sharing a dorm for our freshman year at Appalachian State University. Our dorm room had “ICE” carved into the door, and thus, The Freezer Boys were born.

In that year, along with becoming the type of friends you keep forever, Jack and I started a side-hustle of buying and flipping vintage App State gear on Instagram. We always said we were going to use the money to buy steaks, but I don’t think we ever did. We mostly used it as a way to goof off, be creative, and occasionally pay for half a tank of gas.

We went on to live in a cabin in the woods with the rest of our best buds, high up on Homespun Hills Rd. in Boone, North Carolina. Many nights, we’d sit out on the porch smoking black n milds, asking big questions, and having the kind of long conversations that turn strangers into brothers. It was there we found a home in a town that was still new to us. So it is no coincidence that the name of this project honors that house we owe much to.

Since then, I’ve moved to Raleigh, NC where my wife, Kate, and I have tried to make a corner of the city feel like home. Jack, his wife, Tess, and their little fella Josiah are up in D.C. doing the same. We’ve had great excuses to not keep up, but there are two things that never fail to keep us in touch: our shared desire to be better writers and our love for really cool hats.

One day last year, after chatting on the phone about wanting to be better writers, we were inspired to co-labor on a blog that would hopefully hold us accountable. But a blog is boring, and everyone has one. A writing company is much cooler, and a writing and hat company–well that would just be the dream.

And so HOMESPUN was born.

It combines the two hobbies we love the most: writing and hats.

We aim to write and create things that honor those we come from, those we love, and those we lost–as well as the places, like the cabin on Homespun Hills road, that made us who we are.

Because the truth of the matter is, we are not self-made. We never could’ve been.