Our Story
Founded by two vascular surgeons. Fifteen years. Several failed startups. A tennis court, a dorm printer, a grandmother's surname. The story of a brand told as a constellation of the people who, without planning to, built it.
Scroll the story — the graph follows. Tap a node — the story scrolls to it.
2006
Nikita is practicing tennis with Roman. Roman also trains with a guy named Denis — who plays brilliantly. A face remembered, a name not yet known. Nothing happens. The thread is cast.
2011
Medical university, third year. Nikita buys a secondhand printer-scanner from a dorm neighbor for five dollars. It collects dust for 8 years. In 2019 it scans Alina's first paintings and starts the brand.
2012
Nikita meets Alina at a medical conference in Minsk. She becomes his wife. Her illustrations become the brand.
2013
Alina's grandmother was an ethnic German woman who survived Soviet repression. Her surname was Gräfenstein. Alina mentions it once. Nikita files it away without knowing why.
2014
Nikita launches his first IT startup — a reading mobile app with curated reading plans. The project runs out of money before it finds its audience. But something shifts: an idea became a product. That had never happened before.
2015
Second startup. The idea: AI-generated comprehension questions on any text — to prove what you actually retained. GPT and large language models didn't exist yet. Good idea, wrong moment. No investment follows.
Early 2016
Third startup — a map that shows where your friends are, 30 minutes before you all meet up. Nikita needs a designer. A surgeon he met during professional retraining courses recommends a young woman he once attended art school with: Sascha. She joins. The project goes nowhere. She stays.
Early 2017
A hackathon at Skolkovo, organized by Oracle. Nikita takes an overnight bus, arrives in Moscow, washes his hair at a gas station, walks in fresh. He builds a new MVP — the AI question generator (2nd startup) — in 48 hours with a team he meets on the spot. First place. In the crowd: Alice, Skolkovo HR. Returns home. No investment follows. Another failure. But Alice is now in the network.
Late 2017
Night shift at the hospital. A patient is wearing a t-shirt that says Shikardos — slang for gorgeous, printed by a brand called Benya & Zubrik. Art on fabric. Something clicks.
Late 2018
Nikita wants a tattoo. He wants it to say Alina. He looks up the etymology. The name derives from the Old German Adelheida. He remembers the grandmother's surname. Gräfenstein. Two threads becoming one.
November 2019
The $5 printer from 2011 finally earns its price: Nikita uses it to scan Alina's paintings for the first time. The results are beautiful. Something is now possible.
February 2020
Alina's first painting goes up on the wall at home. Then more follow. Adelheida Gräfenstein. A repressed grandmother's surname. The German etymology of a wife's name. A family history becomes a brand identity.
Late 2020
First direct-print t-shirts. A website. Instagram. First sale. But something feels off — it's printing on blanks, not a brand. White ink on black fabric looks flat. The heat press leaves a glossy mark. The product works, the brand feeling doesn't.
May 15, 2021
Nikita messages Alice — the Skolkovo HR director from 2017 — asking if she'd be willing to be a mentor. She replies with a photograph. In the photo: her and a man wearing new Skolkovo merch. "He says hi." The man in the photo is Denis. Roman's training partner. The tennis player Nikita watched in 2006 — and never met. He is now the founder of a company doing full-cycle merch production for IT companies. One photo. One coincidence. Different countries. Fifteen years. Four degrees of separation.
May 16, 2021
Nikita contacts Roman — his old tennis acquaintance from 2006 — and asks for an intro to Denis. The intro is made within 24 hours.
May 28, 2021
Nikita meets Denis. Decision made: they will work together. The brand finally has a production partner who can do it properly.
June 8–10, 2021
Sascha — who designed for Third startup in 2016 — rejoins. Two t-shirt designs with Alina's illustrations. Packaging. Something still feels missing. A second designer is brought in for brand and marketing design. Two final shirts emerge.
Summer 2021
Photo shoot. Packaging. The brand is real. Products ship.
Late 2021
Meta and Instagram paid ads. The unit economics don't work. Customer acquisition cost is too high to be sustainable. The brand pauses. Not a failure. A proof of concept missing its distribution channel.
2023
Nikita and Alina — both vascular surgeons — leave Belarus and emigrate to Germany. Alina joins the medical team at the rehabilitation clinic in Oberammergau, in the Bavarian Alps. Nikita pivots fully into mobile app development. The brand pauses. Life takes over. But the illustrations are still on the wall.
The brand has a proof of concept. Alina's illustrations exist. The production network exists. The story is paused — not finished. Somewhere, the right distribution channel is waiting. Somewhere, the right conversation is already happening.
"The story didn't end. It just paused — waiting for the next accident."