Conversations with Caden Hanneman, Brant Hanneman

Today we’d like to introduce you to Caden Hanneman, Brant Hanneman

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
The two of us have always been artists and have had a deep appreciation for art our whole lives. In March of 2022, we both decided to begin posting our digital artwork and graphic design work to our Instagram pages (@_sleepyhouse and @vertigo222) to challenge ourselves to continue progressing our skills in the field and share our creative side with the world. Pretty soon, we would find ourselves selling artwork to some small brands that stumbled across our pages. Over the past 3 years each building our solo design agencies, we’ve each gotten many incredible opportunities to work with some amazing bands, brands, businesses, and public figures. Some of these brands include SHEIN, Topo Chico, Ransom, and Billy Bones Club. A few of the public figures and bands we’ve worked with include Philly DeFranco, Jason Cross, Treaty Oak Revival, The Retrograde, Hippies & Cowboys, and many more.
Early on while posting our artwork to Instagram, we had tons of people asking us to begin selling clothing with our artwork on it, to which we soon decided to begin curating our clothing brand, Vertigo House (www.vertigohouse.shop) (@vertigo.house on IG) after about a year and a half of freelancing. With us finally putting together some extra cash doing design work for other brands, we bought a heat press and put our artwork on heat transfer vinyl. From there we started a website and began pressing and selling clothes right from our studio starting in April 2023. We’ve always had a niche for clothing design, so this felt to be a perfect avenue for us to take our work.
During this time, we were pursuing our design degrees at Community College of Denver, where many of our awesome and supportive professors had given us some great opportunities to get our brands some exposure on campus and even set up a pop-up style shop to sell goods on sight.
We have taken a few months hiatus from releasing clothes for Vertigo House to focus primarily on our freelance work, but we have been plotting on the next moves for Vertigo House and by May, we plan to release some of our best clothing yet.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Obviously, building a business from the ground up is never an easy feat. Being freelance designers, there’s never any guarantee that you’re going to have as good of a month as the last, in terms of project volume/income. It varies A LOT. You can never predict when the work will slow down or if you’re going to be neck deep stressing yourself out about so many different deadlines. Not only that but owning our clothing brand has been nothing but learning experiences for the two of us. Being young, we have come to find that’s one of the best ways to learn lessons, however. Through many of the obstacles we’ve faced, whether it be our freelance work or our shared clothing brand, we’ve found that having each other is one of the most important things that keeps us motivated towards our goals.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
The biggest thing that sets the two of us apart from others is that we’re always pushing ourselves to improve as both designers, visionaries, and brand owners. Ever since we started in March 2022, we have pushed ourselves every single day to improve. Through doing so, we’ve been able to harness our own niche and style. As stated previously, every hiccup when running these businesses is best viewed as a learning experience and an opportunity to improve and grow.
What we’re most proud of is being able to help so many other visionaries and creatives achieve their goals, while also growing our brand along the way. We both feel that we still have a long way to go and lot to achieve, but there’s no doubt that we’re very proud of what we’ve done in just 3 years.

Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
With Instagram being where we started everything, that is an app that’s very important to us. We never could’ve gotten the ball rolling without it. Through Instagram, we still heavily run our businesses to this day and have had the pleasure to meet so many other intuitive and creative people that we can share our knowledge and experience with and vice versa.
Aside from this, Pinterest is easily our favorite mood board site for helping guide our ideas.
And finally, the Adobe Creative Suite, for obvious reasons. We use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Premiere Pro for pretty much anything and everything as far as business and brand ventures go.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://vertigohouse.shop/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_sleepyhouse/ , https://www.instagram.com/vertigo222/ , https://www.instagram.com/vertigo.house/

Image Credits
Photos: Isaiah Pursley (@zay.peg_)