Have you seen one of those "Wing Man" shirts with a proud Labrador retriever watching ducks fly over?
        How about a "RITS: Raised in the Sticks" shirt?
        Both are Smith & Wasden Clothing Company originals. Now Statesboro area residents don't have to catch them at an expo in Atlanta, Perry or Moultrie.
        After three years selling T-shirts and other clothing with original artwork and slogans at shows such as the Sunbelt Ag Expo, the Buckarama and the Turkeyrama, outdoorsman George Wasden and artist Terry Smith decided to bring a unique store to Statesboro.
        The Smith & Wasden shop opened June 9 beside the Mellow Mushroom restaurant on Bermuda Run. The business partners did the decorating themselves and even built most of the display furnishings, from the coatracks to a stout table made of deadhead cypress felled in the Ogeechee River 80 years ago.
        "Everything in here is original," Wasden said. "Terry does all our art work. We don't hire anything out. We do everything from the first shirt to the last shirt, and most of our props we build."
        The Smith & Wasden partnership began in 2013. Wasden, from Millen, wasn't a retailer or an artist, but he wanted to start a clothing line, he said.
        He owns timber and farm land, and his work experience includes planting trees and driving heavy equipment. He learned a love of hunting and fishing from his father, W.T. "Geechee" Wasden, who ran a sawmill in Millen for about 50 years.
        "I was trying to get a clothing line started and doing something for nature and the rivers," Wasden said. "I'm like - I don't want to say a protector of the land, but - a steward of the land."

Well, the ad worked
        Seeking to create clothing that would express his attitudes, Wasden placed an ad in the Statesboro Herald for a T-shirt artist, and eventually received more than 1,000 responses, he said.
        Meanwhile, an experienced T-shirt artist, Terry Smith, was already living in Statesboro. Originally from Delaware,         Smith once worked for DuPont, based in Wilmington, Del., before the big company cut its graphic art department, outsourcing the work.
        He then moved to San Diego, Calif., and enjoyed working there as an artist, he said, but eventually sought to return to the East Coast. Smith relocated to Jesup, Ga., and worked as an artist for Dixie Outfitters for 12 years, he said. But after meeting his wife while in Jesup, Smith moved with her to Statesboro.
        "I basically gave up art," Smith said. "I just wanted to do woodwork, and my friend just said, ‘Here's the phone,' and George was on the line, and we spoke for a couple of minutes and ever since that, it's just been like a blessing."
        Over several months, Wasden paid five artists to draw various designs for him, assigning all five the same project each time. From the first, he was looking for a local artist, "and Mr. Smith, his art was just above and beyond everybody I had apply for the job," Wasden said.
        Smith, incidentally, never attended art school. "Not one bit. I was just blessed with a talent to do art," he said.
        The first T-shirt he designed for Wasden was one for the Fair on the Square in Millen. They liked working together, and became business partners, traveling to the big, outdoor-oriented shows to sell their shirts.
        Their four top-selling lines have been the Wing Man, RITS: Raised in the Sticks, Cotton Coast and Reel Man. Each of these represents a variety of designs built around a theme.
        Reel Man produced a spinoff - pun acknowledged - of its own, Reel Woman.
        "Almost every design has its own story," Wasden said. "We've got one that says ‘God, Family and Country Music,' we've got ‘Straight from the South,' ‘Private Property,' ‘Wild Flower.'"
        Smith explained the "Private Property" shirt as a "dad's shirt" for daughters.
        "I should've really put on there, ‘Beware of my Dad,'" he said.
        Despite the specificity of some of the shirts, notice that it's "Raised in the Sticks," not "in the South." The "Straight from the South" shirt is one variation. But overall, the RITS shirts are designed to appeal to rural Americans, not just Southerners.
        "We could have called it Raised in the South, but we would have limited ourselves, so we called it Raised in the Sticks, and the most phenomenal thing was, we have people from Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, Indiana, everywhere coming over and buying this," Smith said.

Symbiotic relationship
        This "more generic" approach is something Wasden said he has learned from Smith.
        "What I don't know, he knows or understands, and what he doesn't understand about the South, I understand," Wasden said. "So it's like a blessing from God. We feed off each other. Every show we go to, everything we do, we learn and grow."
        Doing the shows over the past three years, they evolved from taking a car and setting up a table in five minutes to towing a 26-foot trailer and needing several hours to set up a booth measuring 10 by 40 feet. Other shops now carry some of their shirts.
        By the time they opened their own store, Smith and Wasden had more than 7,000 shirts in stock.
        A large wooden loft gives the store a second story. Up there, a boutique area contains casual dresses, and there are more polo-style and button-up shirts. Even the furniture is for sale.
        Right now, the owners are the store's only employees, but they want to select carefully and hire some help. They will also continue to sell at shows.
        Smith and Wasden purchase the undecorated shirts in selected colors and supply the designs to a printing and embroidery company in Savannah. But they follow the process, getting proof prints and tweaking ink choices and eliminating unnecessary design elements before the final run, Smith said.
        "So we follow up on it, and maybe one day we'll have our own little facility around here that we can do it ourselves and hire local people to run it," he said.