How seven foreigners became one family
Nobody picked anybody for their country. We were just the ones in the gym on lunch break instead of the cafeteria, for the same unglamorous reason, and there were enough of us for a game.
You find out a lot about someone in pickup ball. Who passes. Who calls their own fouls. Who keeps showing up on the days they're losing.
Two of us share Cameroon and still argue about whose mother makes it properly. One carries Belgium and Congo in the same passport and has spent a lifetime being asked to pick one. One of us is Québécois. No accent to lose, no papers to chase, nothing to prove by being there. Showed up anyway. Every day.
That's more or less the whole idea. Belonging wasn't a document. It was whoever kept coming back to the gym.
What we learned from each other's kitchens
Here's what nobody tells you about growing up between cultures: it's the fastest education you will ever get, and it happens at dinner.
We learned that some dishes take four hours and are worth every one of them. We learned three ways to say be careful and about fifteen ways to say you're family now. We learned that every culture on earth has a proverb about the same handful of things: patience, debt, mothers, luck. And that hearing yours in someone else's language is how you finally understand your own.
None of us became less of what we were. All of us became more.
A new dish, a new word, a saying you can't quite translate. Collect enough of them and you stop seeing strangers.
Most conversations about immigration treat it like arithmetic: numbers in, numbers out. From where we're standing it looks more like a roster. Everyone who joins brings something the group didn't have before.
The family was stronger than the problems
It hasn't all been basketball. There were stretches that were genuinely rough. Money, papers, families under strain, doors that closed without anyone explaining why. We're not going to list them out on a website.
The part worth saying is the pattern: none of it ever turned out to be bigger than the seven of us. Not once in eight years.
That's all Family Over Worries means. Nobody workshopped it. It's just the thing that kept being true.
Why a clothing brand
Because a hoodie goes places an argument can't.
We wanted something you can wear on a Tuesday that says I'm one of them, and I'm fine with that, without you having to say anything at all.
50%
And because we remember exactly what arriving costs, half of our profits go to the organizations that make arriving survivable: language classes, paperwork, housing, a first job, and the projects that keep our cultures alive. Published after every drop, down to the cent.
Someone gave each of us a hand at some point. This is us passing it on.
Eight years later
We're not seven kids in a gym on lunch break anymore. Some of us have moved cities. The group chat has never once gone quiet.
FOREIGNERS is basically an invitation to the same game. Bring your dish, your language, the saying that loses everything in translation. There's room. Honestly, making room is the one thing we've always been good at.
Every foreigner belongs here.