I've been angry for a long time.
Not the trendy kind. Not the kind you perform for a carousel post and then move on. The kind that lives in your chest like a second heartbeat. The kind that wakes you up at 3am reading legislation that affects people you love. The kind that makes you want to scream at strangers in line at the grocery store — not because they did anything, but because they're buying organic kombucha while someone two blocks away is sleeping under a bridge and the city just made that illegal.
That kind of angry.
I've tried a lot of things with this anger. I've made content. I've posted threads. I've argued in comment sections with people who peaked in high school and now have opinions about immigration. I've donated money and shared links and screamed into the void and done all the things you're supposed to do when you care and it doesn't feel like enough.
Because it isn't enough. It's never enough. But that's not a reason to stop. That's a reason to get more creative about how you do it.
So here's what I did. I started a streetwear brand called Cuntry Club, and if you just flinched at the name, stay with me. Or don't. Either way I'm going to explain myself, not because I owe you an explanation, but because the origin story is part of the point.
How we got here.
My name is Memphis Mori. I'm a queer lesbian South African immigrant living in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. I own a tattoo and piercing studio called House of GRIM. I have a podcast. I have over 100K followers on Instagram. I have two kids and a hand injury that retired me from tattooing and a mouth that has never once retired from anything.
A while back, I started a brand called Inkonoclasm. The idea was beautiful — a merch collective exclusively for queer tattoo artists. A space where the people who were being erased from tattoo history could make work, sell work, and get paid for work under one roof.
And it was beautiful. For a while.
But here's the thing about collectives: they require other people. And other people have their own timelines and their own priorities and their own lives, and coordinating all of that while also running a studio and raising kids and creating content and trying not to lose your entire mind is — and I say this with love — a logistical nightmare that nearly broke me.
So I sat with it. I looked at what worked and what didn't. The designs I'd done myself — Radical Leftist Scum, the Bimbo collection — those sold. Those resonated. Those were the pieces people tagged me in and DM'd me about and wore to protests and posted in their stories. The stuff that came directly from my brain and my rage and my mouth.
And I thought: what if I just did that? What if I stopped trying to build a collective and just built a megaphone?
What Cuntry Club is.
Let me tell you what a country club is first.
A country club is a gate. It's a fence around a manicured lawn where the right kind of people pay the right kind of money to be around the right kind of other people. It's exclusion dressed up in khakis. It's generational wealth playing golf while the rest of us figure out how to afford groceries. It's the physical manifestation of "know your place" — except the place is outside, looking in, and the door was never meant to open for you.
Country clubs are quiet. They're polite. Everyone behaves. Nobody makes a scene. Nobody raises their voice. Nobody talks about anything that might make someone uncomfortable between the second and third hole.
Cuntry Club is the opposite of all of that.
We are loud. On purpose. We are angry. On purpose. We reclaimed a word your mother told you never to say and put it in an elegant serif font on a heraldic crest with crossed daggers and barbed wire, because irony is a weapon and so is a crewneck.
There is no gate. There is no dress code. There is no membership fee. There is only the work.
The money part.
Here's where I need you to pay attention because this is the part that matters more than the clothes.
20% of every single sale goes directly to an organization fighting for human rights.
Not "a portion of proceeds." Not "up to" some percentage that they calculate after expenses and overhead and CEO bonuses. Not a vague "we support" with a logo on the website and nothing behind it.
Twenty percent. Of every sale. Every time. No exceptions.
Every month, we spotlight a different cause and the organization doing the real work. At the end of the month, we post the donation receipt publicly. On Instagram. On the site. For anyone to see. Because transparency isn't a marketing angle — it's the bare fucking minimum, and the fact that it's rare enough to be notable tells you everything you need to know about how most brands operate.
The causes rotate because the crises rotate. Trans rights this month. Reproductive justice next month. Immigrant rights. Harm reduction. Civil liberties. Queer youth. The list is long because the list of people being failed by the systems that are supposed to protect them is long. And it's getting longer.
You buy a hoodie, you fund the fight. You buy a sticker, you fund the fight. You buy anything from this store and money moves — not into a foundation I control, not into a vague "initiative," but into the bank account of an organization that is doing the work I cannot do from behind a screen in Hamilton, Ontario.
That is the business model. That is the entire point.
Fuck respectability politics.
I need to say this part because someone is going to read the name of this brand and decide I'm not serious. Someone is going to see the word "cunt" and the word "bimbo" and the hot pink and the profanity and decide this is a joke, or a gimmick, or that I'm not the right kind of activist because the right kind of activist doesn't swear or wear lipstick or call herself a bimbo on the internet.
To that person: respectability politics is a cage they built for us.
They told us if we were polite enough, calm enough, professional enough, digestible enough — they'd listen. They'd give us our rights. They'd see us as human. And we believed it. Some of us spent our whole lives being the right kind of queer, the right kind of immigrant, the right kind of woman, the right kind of angry. Measured. Articulate. Non-threatening.
And they still didn't listen.
They still took the rights. They still passed the laws. They still looked the other way. They still said "wait" and "not now" and "there's a process" while people died waiting for the process to process.
So no. I am not interested in being palatable. I am not interested in making my activism comfortable for people who aren't affected by the things I'm fighting against. I am not interested in a brand that whispers when the moment calls for screaming.
Cuntry Club is a scream in an elegant font. And if that offends you more than the things we're screaming about, I need you to sit with that for a minute.
I don't care about your feelings. I care about their lives.
This is the line I keep coming back to, and I want to break it down because it sounds harsh and I mean it to.
When someone tells me the name of my brand is offensive, I think about the trans kid in Texas whose parents are being investigated for giving them healthcare.
When someone tells me I should be more professional, I think about the immigrant family separated at the border who will never find each other again.
When someone tells me that swearing undermines my message, I think about the queer people in countries where being who they are is punishable by death, and I promise you they are not concerned about my language.
Your discomfort with how I say things is not more important than why I'm saying them. Period. End of discussion. If the font I used bothers you more than the headline, you were never going to help anyway.
What this looks like in practice.
I design everything myself. Every graphic, every phrase, every collection. There is no design team. There is no creative director. There is no focus group or brand strategist or anyone asking "but will this perform well on Instagram?"
I don't care if it performs well on Instagram. I care if it says something true.
The aesthetic is a country club on fire. Heraldic crests with barbed wire. Bodoni serifs screaming profanity. Hot pink and black. Roses and daggers. The whole visual language of wealth and exclusivity, hijacked and set ablaze. It should look expensive until you read it. That's the joke. That's always been the joke — that elegance and rage are not opposites. They never were.
Pieces are limited runs when I can manage it, print on demand when I can't. I'm one person running this alongside a tattoo studio and a podcast and two kids and a life. I am not going to pretend this is a luxury fashion house. It's a woman with a laptop and a cause and a printer and absolutely zero interest in scaling to the point where the mission gets diluted.
If it grows, it grows. If it stays small, the money still moves.
The rules of the club.
There are only three.
One. If you see something, say something. Not to management. Not in a DM. Not in a private story that disappears in 24 hours. Out loud. To everyone. Every time. Even when it costs you. Especially when it costs you. Speaking up when it's free means nothing. Speaking up when it's expensive is the only version that counts.
Two. Take care of each other. This is not an individual sport. The person next to you is not your competition. They are your people. Mutual aid isn't charity. Showing up isn't optional. Community is a verb, not a brand aesthetic.
Three. Never let them make you quiet. Quiet is what they want. Quiet is how they win. They will call you aggressive, emotional, too much, unhinged, unprofessional, divisive. They will tone-police you. They will tell you there's a better way to say it. There isn't. The way you're saying it is the way it needs to be said. Do not let them turn down your volume so they can be more comfortable while people suffer.
So.
That's Cuntry Club.
It's a store. I'm not going to pretend it isn't. I sell things. You buy things. Money changes hands. That's commerce, and I live inside capitalism whether I like it or not.
But it's a store that bleeds. 20% of everything that comes in goes right back out to the people who need it. And the other 80% keeps the lights on so I can keep making things that make people think, or laugh, or get angry, or start a conversation with the stranger on the bus who just read their shirt three times.
I started this brand because I'm angry. I'm keeping it going because anger without action is just a feeling, and feelings don't fund legal defense teams.
If you're angry too, welcome to the club.
If you're tired, welcome to the club.
If you're both — yeah. Same.
There's no gate. There's no dress code. There's no fee.
There's just the work. And it doesn't stop.
