As far as this company goes it literally was mis-spelling the name "Aerostich" when making the master artwork for the first printing of letterhead stationery and business cards, and when opening the business's checking account and applying for the Minnesota corporate registration. You probably thought I was going to write something facetious, funny or philosophic here. Nope. I’m an idiot when it comes to many things, and spelling is near the top of that subset.The correct spelling, as I learned later, is "stitch", not "stich". I wanted a generic name to avoid being embarrassed if the business failed, so I didn’t use my own name like Leon "L.L.Bean", Hirotake "Arai" or Louis Comfort "Tiffany". Whatever.

The word "Aero" seemed appropriately generic because motorcycle riders are always in the wind, and "stich" was added because we were planning to sew a completely new kind of rider’s armored coverall.

Commercial printing and advertising artwork were made a lot differently back in 1983. Personal computers and desktop publishing did not yet exist. To make letterheads you could use a razor blade and a product called Chartpack, which was an adhesive graphic and lettering system that any local printer could use to produce and print something. It took me a couple of hours with an X-Acto knife to create the Aerostich logo artwork. Our first print order came to 1000 cards and 500 stationary sets at a total cost of maybe $35. I proudly showed the results to my mother a few days later and she immediately told me I'd mis-spelled stitch. "Thanks mom…" was all I could say.

After worrying about that for a couple of days I went to a library and looked up the meanings of the word "stich" in an unabridged dictionary, and in the end decided to save the money needed to reprint everything. A "stich" is what you call a single line in a poem. Riding and great sewing are both sometimes a bit sublime and beautiful, just like a good line in a poem. That's the story I told myself to save us the $35, so Aerostich kept its mis-spelled name.

Our generic made-up name really didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t now, either.  Riding more is what matters.

– Mr. Subjective 5-2020

Addendum: Regarding ‘desktop publishing’, I should have written “for me”, as in: “back in 1983 desktop publishing did not yet exist for me.”

The first-ever Macintosh computer went on sale in 1984. This was the one with the mouse and the GUI (graphical user interface). I probably saw my first one in 1985. For our first catalog we did the layouts on stiff paper with faint blue grids, carefully hand waxing in place hand cut out laser-printed text paragraphs and artwork. To generate that text we used a 1984 Macintosh a friend had just purchased. But he did not have a laser printer. The least expensive models of those were in the $3-4,000 range, which was well beyond our means, so we took a floppy disc (?) from the Mac to a computer retail store and gave the sales person $20 to let us print out the text on some regular copy paper. It printed dark and perfect letters. I think it was an Apple branded laser printer…I only remember walking upstairs to this little store located above a mainstreet clothing store and seeing the laser printer sitting there dramatically on a pedestal in the center of the space under a spotlight. Along one wall were shelves with various kinds of personal computers. After we got back to the Aerostich shop with our crisp laser-printed text we started cutting up the printed copy paper and making catalog page layouts with the waxing tool. After those were all done they went to a printer.