We are Ruairi & Laura, and we are into old cars, old vans, and old buildings. We live in Ireland, and we spend a lot of time in Spain. We work in e-commerce mostly for other people, but Tin Top is our own passion project to bring together our work and our lifestyle.
Our office is a 400-year-old dairy, and our warehouse is an old stone haybarn built in 1898 and restored by us in 2022. Along with a small pigsty these buildings form one of the last remaining traditional farmyards on the Cooley Peninsula near Dundalk in Ireland. We don’t have any animals though (apart from Eddie, our Jack Russell). What we do have is a collection of unexceptional (but I think interesting) vehicles that we love to work on and drive to various events. They include a 1971 Volkswagen Type 2, a 1985 Mercedes 207D, a 1998 VW Lupo, and a 2006 Passat Variant that has extremely low mileage.
In the old farmyard we have a range of open fire areas where we do most of our cooking. We love grass fed Irish beef – almost obsessively. A dry aged rib-eye cooked over oak and eaten with oily hands after working on an old VW is basically my idea of heaven.
So how do we make what we love what we do? We decided to be obvious. Tin Top is our stories as we work on old vehicles, drive them to Spain to explore, bring home food and wine, cook it over fire, and do some more exploring around Ireland and the rest of Europe. And how do we make money? We use the stories to inspire local and European designers to come up with original and unique illustrations. Then we get those hand printed on organic cotton clothing, ethically traded and carbon neutral. Then we use our e-commerce experience to make the best clothing website we can.
Our t-shirts are double stitched, premium combed cotton and they are screen printed by hand in an artisan print studio. Every design including our logo is by a professional artist. We were going to write that on the back in giant letters interspersed with some pseudo-Japanese writing using a nice fake patina font. But we didn’t, so nobody will ever know.
And the best part is that if you buy some clothing from us, we put all the money back into content for the website and YouTube. So, it’s a win-win.
