Online Ceramics: How Two Deadhead Friends Built a Streetwear Brand Without Selling Ceramics
Online Ceramics sells no ceramics. The name was a misdirection from the start, a small inside joke that stuck around long after two friends stopped selling bootleg tie-dye shirts out of a van in concert parking lots.
What began as an homage to the Grateful Dead grew into a brand trusted by A24, Marc Jacobs, and The North Face, without ever losing the DIY, hand-dyed feel that made people notice it in the first place.
From a Dorm Room in Ohio to Selling Out of a Van
Alix Ross and Elijah Funk met at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio, bonding over a shared love of art and experimental music. After graduating and eventually reconnecting in Los Angeles, the two founded Online Ceramics in 2016.
A Bootleg Start
The earliest version of the brand had nothing to do with a formal business plan. Ross and Funk hand-dyed tie-dye shirts featuring Grateful Dead imagery and sold them out of the back of their vans at concerts, where the pieces sold out almost immediately. That kind of organic, product-first origin is a common thread in strong brand stories, where the audience finds the product before there is anything resembling a company behind it.
Turning Fandom Into a Legitimate License
Selling unofficial Grateful Dead merchandise could easily have ended in a trademark dispute rather than a career. Instead, Online Ceramics built a relationship with Rhino, the label that manages the Grateful Dead’s rights, and secured official trademark use.
Rather than folding official Grateful Dead merchandise directly into the main label, the founders created a separate line called Turtle River specifically for licensed pieces. That structure let Online Ceramics use the trademarks a few times a year without letting the Dead’s imagery define the entire brand, preserving room to work with movies, musicians, and other partners without being permanently pigeonholed.
Proving There’s a Dark Side Too
By 2018, Online Ceramics had gained press attention and a placement at Dover Street Market, but Ross has said she was uncomfortable with a narrative forming around the brand as simply hippies making tie-dye shirts for Deadheads.
The brand’s first official collaboration with film studio A24, tied to the horror film Hereditary, was a deliberate move to complicate that image. It signaled that Online Ceramics could sit comfortably next to genuinely unsettling material, not just cosmic, feel-good psychedelia, and it set the tone for a longer collaboration relationship with A24 that continued through films like Midsommar.
Collaborations Beyond Music
Once the brand proved it could move beyond one subculture, its list of partners expanded quickly. Online Ceramics has worked with Marc Jacobs, The North Face, and Casio, alongside the estates of spiritual teacher Ram Dass and musicians Fela Kuti and Alice Coltrane, pairing its screen printing and hand-dye techniques with names from fashion, outdoor gear, and music heritage alike.
According to The New York Times, the brand has managed to hold onto its sense of authenticity even as its audience grew to include mainstream celebrities, a balance that is difficult for most streetwear brands to maintain once demand moves past their original niche.
A Brand That Outgrew Its Founding Partnership
In 2024, Ross and Funk amicably ended their working partnership, closing the chapter that had defined Online Ceramics since 2016. The split was widely covered as the end of an era for the brand’s original creative dynamic, though it did not end the label itself.
For a brand built so heavily around two specific people’s shared taste, a founder split is one of the hardest transitions to navigate. Whether Online Ceramics continues to carry the same creative voice going forward will depend on how much of that identity lived in the founders personally versus the systems, licenses, and relationships they built around it.
What Independent Brands Can Learn From Online Ceramics
Online Ceramics shows that a brand built on someone else’s intellectual property does not have to stay a legal liability. Turning an unofficial fan project into a licensed, structured relationship with Rhino protected the brand while still letting it lean into what made it popular in the first place.
The second lesson is about actively managing perception. Rather than letting the market define Online Ceramics as a single-subculture novelty, the founders deliberately sought out a collaboration that complicated that narrative before it hardened into a permanent label. The third lesson is more cautionary: a brand this closely tied to two specific founders’ personal taste needs to think early about what happens if that partnership ever changes, because the same intimacy that makes a brand feel authentic can also make it fragile.
Frequently Asked Questions about Online Ceramics
Alix Ross and Elijah Funk founded Online Ceramics in 2016 in Los Angeles, after meeting at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio and bonding over a shared love of art and music.
No. The name is a playful misdirection with no connection to pottery. The brand focuses on hand-dyed, tie-dye apparel and screen-printed graphics instead.
Yes. The brand secured an official trademark relationship with Rhino, the label that manages the Grateful Dead’s rights, and releases licensed pieces through a dedicated line called Turtle River rather than the main collection.
Online Ceramics partnered with A24 in 2018 around the horror film Hereditary, a deliberate move to show the brand could work with darker, unsettling material beyond its Grateful Dead-inspired roots.
No. The two co-founders amicably ended their working partnership in 2024, closing the chapter that had defined the brand’s creative direction since its founding in 2016.
