BY Lauren McCutcheon
Oct. 04, 2024
Friday, October 4, is World Smile Day. If that’s not enough to turn your frown upside down, then consider the story of 18-year-old Center City resident Sammy Grossman, a sneakerhead and senior at Barrack High School who, on this global day for grinning, is launching Project Spread Smiles, a limited-edition clothing brand designed to make both the wearer and observer a little happier.
Project Spread Smiles isn’t a huge, entire season of clothing. It’s three casual, made-to-order pieces that will be available for sale for seven days only: a white t-shirt, a gray hoodie, and a trucker hat. Each item bears a green smiley face logo with a sideways semicolon for eyes. The sweatshirt and T have the logo on the front and a message on the back, where multi-colored neon bubble letters spell out:
HEY.
TO THE PERSON BEHIND ME.
YOU LOOK GREAT TODAY!
KEEP SMILING.
It’s a sweet, heartfelt communiqué. But it’s also … smart. And, it’s directly connected to Grossman’s five-year-old depression diagnosis and his effort to help others who are similarly struggling.
Read the words, “You look great today,” and chances are, you’ll feel a little better. Not just because you believe in your own current attractiveness. Even if you know for a fact that you truly look like shit, doesn’t it feel kinda good to know that the t-shirt or hoodie-wearing stranger in front of you is a human who openly cares about others?
The keep smiling part is supposed to curve the corners of your mouth upward, and pass that smile along, since smiles are scientifically proven to be contagious. According to a 2016 report, “Fashioning the Face: Sensorimotor Simulation Contributes to Facial Expression Recognition” in Trends in Cognitive Science, “When people simulate a perceived facial expression, they partially activate the corresponding emotional state in themselves.” Smile, in other words, and the whole world smiles with you.
But the message is also smartly placed. The words stretch down the shirts’ backs, requiring no face-to-face interaction, no eye contact between reader and wearer — and, importantly, no hint that the wearer might be telling a stranger to, you know, perk up / look cute / make your face more pleasing for them to view. Also, the words’ location means there’s no chance that in order to read the message, you’ll need to gaze at the wearer’s chest.
But there’s something more, something wisely in-the-know about the logo — not a wink, but an arched eyebrow. Grossman used a semicolon for the smiley face’s eyes, based on a trend that started about a decade ago when Amy Bleuel, who was also impacted by mental illness, suggested people draw the punctuation mark on their wrist to symbolize awareness and survival. The inking went viral, and Bleuel went on to found Project Semicolon, a nonprofit that works to erase stigma around mental illnesses and help prevent self-harm.
Why a semicolon? As any bona fide grammar nerd will tell you, the upside-down apostrophe’s highest and best use is to replace an “and” linking two independent clauses. In other words, the mark symbolizes that a story is ongoing, continuing, without a period, without ending. The semicolon means resilience, endurance, survival.
Endurance is something Grossman knows something about. He figures he’s had depression for at least five years — more than a quarter of his short lifetime. His pediatrician first first diagnosed him during a well visit after after Sammy filled out an intake form that asked, simply: How are you really feeling?
His doctor showed his response to Sammy’s mom and dad, who took it seriously and helped connect their son to a therapist. “It’s just been up from there,” he says. “I’ve learned to live with it, learned to battle it, instead of just letting it consume me.”
Up until that point, he felt like he was keeping his “emotions just balled up inside my body, just waiting to explode.” Today, he’s at the point where he doesn’t need to see his therapist as often. He’s learned techniques to manage unwanted feelings.
“Talking to people about my emotions helped a lot. Definitely taking walks, going outside, just listening to music, walking by myself — you know, being by myself, taking deep breaths and meditation — they’re all great ways to cope,” he says.
He’s had friends with similar issues. This tracks. According to the National Institutes of Health, more than one in five American adults — 59.3 million of us — live with mental illness, and about half of that number receive any form of treatment. Men are less likely than women to receive treatment. And more than 36 percent of all people ages 18 to 25 have a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder. Mental health is a worldwide issue affecting 1.6 million people every day.
Grossman, whose dad is kind of a big-time developer (Craig Grossman, of Arts + Crafts Holdings), was otherwise a regular kid. He’s a pitcher for his school’s baseball team. He watches a lot of sports, mostly basketball, football and baseball. He spends time with his brother. And, he collects and sells sneakers: “Nikes, New Balance, Jordan, ASICs — all of the above.”
“I’ve always been into fashion,” he says, “always wanted to create my own clothing line. I thought instead of selling a design or a certain type of clothing, I would rather sell my message, to spread mental health awareness, to spread the story of me.”
Grossman’s dad encouraged him to connect with Raheem Saladeen Johnson, aka the globally massive artist King Saladeen, whose studio is in one of the elder Grossman’s buildings — and whose new Brotherly Love mural resides on an outside wall of another Grossman building at 6th and Spring Garden.
Saladeen, one of The Citizen’s Generation Change Philly, got his start painting t-shirts, sneakers and jean jackets at home in Southwest Philly. He now regularly gets several figures for his paintings and collabs with watchmakers, Fanatics, skateboard brands, toymakers, and, more recently, DraftKings and Listerine. So, he’s a good guy to know if you wanna start a brand.
“Sammy already had an idea of what he wanted: how he should place it, brand it, what would be his Nike sign or his Apple logo” says Saladeen. “We just helped to funnel his ideas, place them on paper. We talked to manufacturers, printing shops, helped him with Shopify — all that different stuff you need on the back end.”
Figure: Project Spread Smiles’ t-shirt, trucker hat and hoodie.
To hear the veteran artist tell it, the process was easy. But it was also gratifying. “Sammy’s brand really, really means something,” he says. “It’s about something he was going through, about how he can connect to us.”
Grossman says he’d like to donate a portion of his proceeds to a mental health awareness nonprofit, but he’s not sure what one yet. Mostly, he’s hoping people will see his message, and just feel a little better.
“Project Spread Smiles is mainly just to tell everyone in the world that they’re not alone, and they have a voice, and they don’t have to sit in silence,” he says. “When you see someone wearing my T-shirt or hoodie, it’s supposed to brighten up someone’s day.”
Kids these days, amiright?
Available for pre-order from noon on October 4 through noon on October 11, Project Spread Smiles is selling branded, made-to-order trucker hats ($28 each), t-shirts ($48) and hooded sweatshirts ($78). Follow them in IG.
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