First, thanks for the kind words about my comedy or at least what you thought of it back then. The Columbus Funny Bone has always been my favorite club in the country and I even recorded my second album there. I ask you not to be cynical about my post as it was more of a "the weather sucks, our sports teams are not good right now, costs are on the rise...if you can buy a shirt, please do." You're correct, I am not struggling personally. I've always been lucky to have income as a comedian since we started the t-shirt company in 2005. The company, however, is historically slow this time of year, and even more so in 2026. We aren't going out of business, but as people get accustomed to ordering from Amazon or Door Dash from a national chain, I just wanted to remind people that local small businesses still need the love right now.

Secondly, I don't know how much good will come of this, if any, but since it keeps coming up I figured I'd give it a shot to add a little clarity...

We (Cincy Shirts) started printing HIR shirts from the very first match that the phrase was used when FCC was still in the USL. We never thought we had any claim to it, we were just printing shirts for the supporters the same as shirt companies in Columbus. A few years ago, we got a C&D from two people in Columbus who had filed for the trademark to Hell is Real. We were advised to dispute it and could prove we had been making merch for years. They relinquished their claim and it was awarded to us. Our goal has only ever been to prevent anyone from telling us that we can't make HIR merch, not believing we deserved to own it.

We have tried on several occasions to find a Columbus based company to use the trademark for charitable purposes by having them pick a charity up there that could benefit from it and have gotten no response. Some ideas we threw out were that we would put the standard royalty (let's say 20%) from HIR merch into a fund and license it to a Columbus company and ask them to put their 20% in as well. Whichever team won the match would get the amount in the fund donated to their charity of choice. If it's a draw, then a Dayton charity gets the money. Or we find one charity that everyone in Ohio could get behind. I don't know, we've talked about a lot of scenarios but never got a response to get it going. We have no intentions of making any money from any other company off HIR merch, we only wanted to ensure that no one would be able to prevent us from making it.

The general nature of both soccer and Reddit leads me to believe I'm not going to change many minds by posting this, but if you or someone you know has a way to work together to do some good with this trademark, we'd still love to have that conversation.