When I saw him working his booth the Ag in Motion outdoor farm show this summer, he looked right at home.
Cole Thorpe was chatting with farmers and other agriculture folks about his company’s trendy Prairie Proud T-shirts, dozens of which were hanging on racks and displays around him, shirts extolling some of the essential images and symbols of Western Canada.
What most grabbed my eye was a black T-shirt with a scattering of tiny yellow flowers, which I hoped were canola blossoms. They were.
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I was a little starstruck when I approached Thorpe and found out he was the company founder and owner. After all, I’ve been proudly wearing a Prairie Proud T-shirt for a few years — a red and white design with a maple leaf that I make sure to have on for Canada Day — and I’m always impressed by people who create cool things out of our regional reality.
It wasn’t the first time I met the guy. That was a few years back in a starkly different setting: the Osborne Village Festival in central Winnipeg, a 15-minute walk from where I live.
He had Prairie Proud’s shirts hanging on racks out on the street as crowds milled around on a busy and hot Canada Day and he seemed to be doing brisk business, including my purchase. That festival, known for large crowds, boisterous beer tents and loud rock music playing from stages erected on closed-off streets of asphalt and concrete, couldn’t be more different from the Ag in Motion set-up.
But both crowds shared one thing in common: pride in this place we call the Prairies. Whether it’s in a gritty urban setting or a windy farm field, people from this part of Canada feel good about where they come from, what they are part of.
Many of us want to show that pride, and that’s a desire Thorpe figured out when he was coming out of business school in Saskatoon.
He had the dream of founding a t-shirt and design company and relentlessly followed that dream, creating images and products which he hawked online-only in 2014, began selling through shows like Ag in Motion and the Winnipeg festival, and finally opened a bricks-and-mortar store in Saskatoon in 2019 — just in time for it to be shut down by the pandemic.
He and his staff persevered through the ups and downs, closures and openings, panics and reliefs that our society is still going through, and he came out fine.
So far, the company’s best online-sales year was 2020. He’s happy to be back out in public again, at shows like Ag in Motion and with his store re-opened.
I’m delighted to see Prairie Proud prosper because I not only like the company’s designs, but love seeing proof that the people in our part of the country identify with it.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve identified more and more with the Prairies and I think that identity is much stronger now across the region than it was when I was a kid, in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, it just seemed like a place you were from, often mocked by those living in Eastern Canada. It didn’t seem like somewhere you wanted to brag about being from.
It’s also cool to see signs that there is something about our prairie reality that connects urban and rural people. As we keep hearing, there is a growing gulf between urban and rural people across Canada, and Western Canada is experiencing that as much as any region. Central Winnipeg and rural Saskatchewan can seem like different worlds.
But people in both western solitudes seem to be inspired by a pride in the Prairies and moved by the central images of our collective mythology — grain, oil, bison, maple leaf — so perhaps we’re not as divided as social media and political chatter makes us seem.
I picked up one of the black canola flower T-shirts and I like wearing it around Winnipeg. Those blossoms deserve to be seen in my neighbourhood and not just outside the city limits.
