Penn State junior Sienna Holland has never taken a single fashion or design class. She taught herself to make her own instead.

The Wilmington, Delaware, native started by making sweatshirts by hand, using a heat press and a Cricut, for $32 apiece. Now that she works with a manufacturer, the quality has improved, but her mission to keep her work affordable has stayed the same.

“I started Wildshore in April of 2023, so my junior year of high school,” Holland said. “I was sick and tired of paying $70-plus for simple sweatshirts. You’re working a minimum wage job, and you want to buy a cute hoodie. Why is it an arm and a leg? I would see hoodies in my closet, and I thought, ‘I could totally make these.'”

When she was coming up with a name for her business, she relied on a word generator. Holland grew up going to the Delaware and Jersey shores, so she knew she wanted her brand to reflect a coastal theme.

“Honestly, I went on a random word generator, and I looked up ocean and coastal words,” Holland said. “I got wild, and then I was between wild shore and wild isle, and shore just ran off the tongue better.”

Holland has been designing every piece she sells herself from the beginning.

The sweatshirt that started it all, a hoodie with a hand-drawn shark on the back, was inspired by a stranger’s tattoo.

“A lot of my designs are inspired by tattoos I would see,” Holland said. “With the classic shark hoodie, I took a picture of the tattoo and traced it. Then the front of the hoodie says Wildshore, but in the shape of a shark, and I drew that by hand. I use that a lot as my logo.”

The shark hoodie is what first made Wildshore blow up on social media. Holland posted a TikTok in the summer of 2023 about her designing her own sweatset, and it now has almost 100,000 views.

Social media has continued to help Holland sell her hoodies. She once again posted a TikTok about selling $40 hoodies “in a world of nothing less than $80,” this time accumulating almost 500,000 views.

“[The TikTok] ended up selling out my entire inventory and three different pre-orders,” Holland said. “So, yeah, I definitely think social media has helped me, especially for stuff like my pop-ups. I just made another TikTok the other day, and it has about 30,000 views. I’m hoping it translates to the next pop-up.”

Holland has produced multiple pop-ups through Wildshore, including two in downtown State College at Connections.

Running a clothing brand while being a student hasn’t been easy. Holland had to temporarily shut down Wildshore during her freshman year because she didn’t have the time to keep making everything by hand.

This year, Holland doesn’t have her car on campus, so getting to the unit where Wildshore stores all its inventory takes planning.

“The distribution aspect has probably been the hardest,” Holland said. “But I’m very Type A, so I have a list and check things off when I go. When I’m organized, everything else is too.”

In addition to running her clothing business, Holland is still a full-time student and works at Connections downtown. She’s been tested through the journey, but she remains committed to her business.

“If I hadn’t just kept it going and kept spending the money, I wouldn’t have had that inventory that sold, the inventory from the TikTok that blew up,” Holland said. “I would just say to my younger self to keep going, even though there are money obstacles or a lack of time.”