By day, Dan Stumpf is a human resources employee for a corporation in downtown San Francisco. But by night, he designs and creates incredibly stylish men’s clothes, from tailored button-down shirts with delicately embroidered cuffs to form-fitting, casual pants.
Stumpf is on a mission to make all of the things he wears. He thinks it’ll take him five years to get there. So even though he’s sometimes exhausted after spending long days at the office, he still manages to put in a few hours of work at his sewing machine.
“It is a bit of a discipline coming home at night feeling a little tired; and you just want to have a glass of wine and watch TV,” Stumpf says. “But I know that at the end of the week, if I haven’t made some progress or buckled down in the evening and spent three hours making something, I’m going to feel the loss of it or the lack of it.”
Stumpf has always possessed a creative streak. He’s played piano since he was a young kid and studied theatre in college. But he’s never thought about art as something he’d do for a living. He views his day job as inspiring and as a way to support his life in the Bay Area. And getting to wear his handmade clothing at work sets him apart from the pack.
“Now I go to an office and I can’t perform necessarily theater in front of people or play music with people,” Stumpf says. “But I can wear my clothing at the office and it makes me feel like I’m taking a piece of that creativity with me. I can stand out.”
