Yahoo Lifestyle Snaps Creates Custom Shirts for Rascal Flatts’ Jay DeMarcus
The pearl snap has been a staple of the Western wear industry since the early 1900s. It was embraced by cowboys and ranch hands searching for durable work shirts and became a fashion statement as well when it began showing up in Hollywood films.
While the shirts continue to be popular among Western wear enthusiasts, Ed Baronne and Patrick Lynn have a mission to bring the pearl snap to a wider audience.
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The founders of Snaps Clothing created their brand in 2021 when they were looking for an alternative path to their corporate careers in health care. Although neither had any background in fashion, they settled on the pearl snap shirt, which the Texas-born Lynn grew up wearing on his family’s ranch. “When my grandfather passed, he left me all his boots, saddles and pearl snaps,” he said. “In college, I would wear them out at night, and everyone would always comment on the pearl snap shirt I had on.”
But he found the classic models to be boxy, voluminous and thin.
Their idea was to make the pearl snap “something you can wear to a date night or drinks with friends or to work,” Lynn said. “How can we make this something that could cross over multiple different generations and multiple different views in life, and make it a shirt for everyone.”
So in partnership with Baronne, they reimagined the shirts to be more modern, using premium fabrics, offering a more tapered fit and created them using sustainable manufacturing practices.
The company soon drew interest from Morrison Seger Venture Capital Partners, which invested along with singer Sammy Kershaw, former baseball player Johnny Damon, UFC fighter Chuck Liddell, TV personality Chris Harrison, TV host Chet Garner and others. The company also caught the eye of Jay DeMarcus, a member of the award-winning country group Rascal Flatts, who also became an investor.
“After sending Jay some shirts, we had some conversations and Jay was pretty excited about it,” Baronne said. “He has a unique sense of fashion and an interest in it. It made a very suitable fit.”
Now Snaps has created a line of custom snaps for DeMarcus to wear on stage when Rascal Flatts’ “Life Is a Highway” tour kicks off on Thursday in Evansville, Ind.
“It was a no-brainer for me,” DeMarcus said. Once Harrison gifted him some of the shirts, “I fell in love immediately — they’re so wearable.”
One thing led to another and DeMarcus and his stylist Renee Layher worked with the Snaps design team to create custom shirts for him to wear on the tour, which will run through April. “We spent a few hours together, going over some material and patterns and things like that, things that were unique to my style and what we felt like would be a great representation on stage for this brand new tour.”
The new tour represents a bit of a shift since the group had announced a farewell tour in 2020, but the pandemic derailed those plans. “All of us were pretty disappointed when COVID-19 came along and sort of put the kibosh on our farewell tour,” he said. “But when I look back on that now, it was really a blessing that we didn’t get to do a farewell tour. There were a lot of twists and turns and broken roads to bring us to this point.”
This year actually marks the 25th anniversary of Rascal Flatts and the tour will celebrate that as well as the fact that band member Joe Don Rooney is celebrating three-plus years of sobriety. “I think the passage of time and the ability to take a deep breath and spend some time really appreciating what we did have has allowed us to have a different perspective and come back together with a renewed energy and a renewed focus to go out and give the fans what they missed out on in 2020,” he said.
Although he didn’t go so far as to say this tour marks the return of Rascal Flatts to the country music scene, he did point to a new single that was released earlier this month called “I Dare You,” a duet with the Jonas Brothers.
“Gary [LeVox, the lead singer] is still focused on his solo stuff and I run a record label, so we’re taking it one day at a time,” he said. “But we certainly never say never.”
The shirts that DeMarcus will wear on tour will not be available commercially, Lynn said. “They’re musician shirts and custom to him.” But there are plenty of other options on the Snaps website for customers to buy, ranging from long-sleeve flannels in plaid for $71.40, ginghams for $109 and short-sleeve solids for $89.
The collection is available primarily on the company’s website but the partners said that last year they started dabbling in wholesale and hope to expand that distribution going forward. They also work with corporations on custom product embroidered with their company names. “Those are two areas we’re going to be expanding in 2025.”
Category expansion is also a possibility in the future. Right now, Snaps only offers shirts but that could change down the line. “If we expand, it will be vertically,” Lynn said. “We’ve talked about doing jackets, but that’s down the road. I think, if anything, we’ll probably expand into women’s and maybe even kids’ shirts.”
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