Our Story

I grew up in foster care on a working farm in a large family. My biological brother and I grew up apart, while the six children in the home where I was raised became brothers and sisters to me in every way that mattered.

I gained brothers and sisters through that experience, but the brother I was born with was never any less my brother because we grew up in different homes. Distance changed the childhood we shared; it never changed the bond of being family.

My childhood had difficult chapters, but it also gave me beautiful memories, family relationships I still treasure, and lessons I’ve carried throughout my life.

Faith and music were woven into our home. The Bible was read, and what was understood from it was taught to us. Music was everywhere—guitar, banjo, sometimes piano.

Some of the old sayings stayed with me too.

One in particular still makes me smile:

“Are you livin’ right?”

Decades later, those words would find their way into Old Justice Outfitters.

My grandparents influenced me as well, although they didn’t raise me. My grandmother died when I was very young, and I saw my grandfather only occasionally, but I always knew that he loved me.

Looking back, I can see pieces of many people in the things I carried forward.

But being taught good things and always living by them are two very different things.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes. I’ve taken wrong turns, made questionable choices, and learned some of life’s most important lessons the hard way.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also come to believe that some old prayers followed me—prayers spoken by a grandmother and by adults who cared what became of me. I believe God heard them.

Marriage, raising my own children, more than 30 years caring for others, successes and failures, joys and heartbreaks, mistakes and second chances all added lessons of their own.

Eventually, the values I’d heard about when I was young stopped being simply things other people had taught me.

They became things life had proven to me.

I don’t come to Old Justice as someone who has always gotten life right.

I come to it as someone who has lived long enough to know which things are worth carrying forward.

By the time my youngest daughter, Lulu, was old enough to really look at the world around her, I had lived enough life to know I couldn’t protect my children from every hardship, wrong turn, disappointment, or difficult season.

But I could try to give them something solid to stand on.

Lulu is sixteen, a 4.0 student, and a young woman who loves the Lord. She’s growing up in a world very different from the one I knew at sixteen.

Some of those differences are wonderful. Others bring challenges my generation never had to navigate.

But somewhere along the way, I realized something:

A changing world doesn’t make enduring values obsolete.

Faith doesn’t matter less because the world has changed.

Neither does character. Keeping your word. Hard work. Personal responsibility. Compassion. Courage. Family. Protecting someone who needs protecting.

Those things haven’t reached an expiration date.

If anything, I believe they matter more today than ever.

That’s what I wanted Lulu to understand.

The times you live in don’t get to decide who you become.

She doesn’t have to live in the past. I wouldn’t want her to.

She has a whole future ahead of her.

But moving forward doesn’t require leaving everything good behind.

Take what is good. Learn from what wasn’t. Hold onto what has stood the test of time. Then carry those things forward in a way that makes sense in the world you’re living in now.

That’s what we mean when we talk about old values.

They’re not old because their time has passed. They’re old because they’ve stood the test of time.

And somewhere along the way, this stopped being simply about what I was teaching Lulu.

She was teaching me too.

She brought the perspective of her generation, her own convictions, creativity, ideas—and, believe me, plenty of opinions of her own.

She isn’t a younger copy of me, and I wouldn’t want her to be.

We started talking.

Then we started creating.

And eventually, we started building.

There was something else I wanted for Lulu.

Like every mother, I know there will someday come a time when I won’t be here to answer the phone, give my opinion, offer advice—or tell her she’s overthinking something.

I pray that day is a very long way off.

But motherhood has made me think about what we really leave our children.

I wanted Lulu to have more than memories of things I’d told her.

I wanted us to build something together.

I wanted her to learn, while I was still right here beside her, that an idea in her head could become something real.

That she could take what she knew, learn what she didn’t, work through mistakes, and create something that hadn’t existed before.

Lulu learned early that it was okay to dream big.

But she also began learning something equally important:

Dreams aren’t only things you wish for. You can work on them. You can build them.

Our first real project together was Trackwell United.

Trackwell grew from things close to our own lives: caregiving, families, practical needs, and the everyday challenges people face when caring for themselves or someone they love.

My years in nursing and caregiving brought experience. Lulu brought creativity, energy, and the perspective of someone willing to look at an old problem and ask whether there might be another way to approach it.

Together, we began creating books, journals, caregiving resources, and other products intended to be genuinely useful to real people.

Trackwell United is still active and growing. Some of our ideas have become real products. Others are being developed, and plenty more are still waiting their turn.

But Trackwell gave us something neither of us expected.

It taught us that we could build together.

We’re mother and daughter, so naturally we don’t always agree.

We learned how to take an idea apart, debate it, change it, occasionally throw the whole thing out and start over, and sometimes look at each other afterward and realize we’d created something pretty darn good.

More importantly, Lulu was learning that she could build from what she already knew—and learn what she needed for everything else.

Whatever our businesses ultimately become, that lesson alone will have been worth building them together.

We needed additional income for our family.

That’s part of our story, and we’re not ashamed to say it.

We wanted to build something of our own that could help financially while also meaning something to us.

But we weren’t sitting around dreaming of becoming clothing designers.

We simply had things we believed were worth saying.

• Things about faith.
• Family.
• Character.
• Hard work.
• Personal responsibility.
• Keeping your word.
• Courage.
• Grace.
• Protecting children and vulnerable people.
• Standing up when standing up isn’t easy.

Some of those thoughts were new.

Some had been following me for decades.

Some grew from conversations between a mother who had lived enough life to learn a few things the hard way and a daughter just beginning to discover what she believed for herself.

We started putting those thoughts into words.

The words became designs.

The designs became shirts.

Then came hoodies, tumblers, and collections.

And somewhere along the way, we looked up and realized:

Apparently, we’d started a clothing brand.

Old Justice Outfitters had been born.

But the clothing was never really the starting point.

The message was.

Old Justice isn’t about pretending the past was perfect.

It wasn’t.

It isn’t about pretending we’re perfect.

We’re certainly not.

And it isn’t about telling everyone else how they ought to live.

It’s about holding onto the things experience has taught us are still worth holding onto.

• We believe faith still matters.
• We believe family matters.
• We believe your word should mean something.
• We believe hard work and personal responsibility still have value.
• We believe people deserve dignity.
• We believe grace and second chances matter.
• And we believe real strength should be used to protect—not intimidate—those who have less of it.

That belief eventually helped shape our Try Me collection.

To us, “Try Me” isn’t about looking for a fight.

It’s about the child who needs an adult willing to stand between them and harm.

The elderly person who deserves protection and dignity.

The vulnerable person who shouldn’t have to stand alone.

The animal without a voice.

It’s the willingness to say:

You don’t stand alone.

Because sometimes strength isn’t about who you can overpower.

Sometimes it’s about who you’re willing to protect.

We’re still learning.

We’re still dreaming.

We’re still making mistakes.

And we’re still building.

We don’t know exactly where Trackwell United or Old Justice Outfitters will eventually take us.

But we know why we’re doing it.

We want to create things that say something worth saying and make things worth putting our names on.

I want Lulu to know that the world will change around her—and that’s okay.

The times she lives in don’t get to decide who she becomes.

She can move forward without leaving everything good behind.

And someday, God willing many years from now, she’ll decide which things from our years together are worth carrying forward again.

Maybe that’s what this has really been about all along.

Some of what I’m giving Lulu was handed to me.

Some I learned through mistakes and hard lessons.

Some we’ve discovered together.

And some we’ve built side by side.

The world will keep changing. It always has.

But the things worth keeping don’t become worthless simply because they’re old.

Old values aren’t dead.

They’re being handed down.