Paws in the Park
Giving back · August 2026
Paws in the Park
A few thousand people, a great many dogs, and a park on the Gold Coast at seven in the morning. We brought the stall, the dog range and an oversized Instagram frame, and then we stood behind a trestle table and watched what people actually do with a message.
Here is the thing we already knew but had never watched happen in real time. People read our shirts out loud. Not to us, to each other. A woman would nudge her friend and point, and the friend would laugh, and then both of them would come over. The frame was just an excuse to stand near each other long enough for it to happen.
That is the whole reason any of this works. A tee is not a billboard you look at, it is a sentence somebody else is wearing, and it gets read by strangers in supermarket aisles and dog parks and school pickup lines all week long, whether we are standing there or not.
One of our customers described it better than we can:
“Love this shirt! Was wearing it the other day at the supermarket and a man came up to me and said ‘I love your shirt. I just read what it says and wanna say thank you’.”Yenthe, Selfawear customer
That is a market day, several hundred times over in one morning. Our customers tell us it keeps happening long after the tent comes down. Strangers stop them in the street. Someone taps them on the shoulder in a queue to say thank you. People write in to tell us a complete stranger said the shirt changed their day.
So if you were one of the people who stopped by the stall, thank you. And if you were not, there is a fair chance you have already read one of these messages on somebody’s back without ever knowing where it came from.
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