Meet the two of us

She got into metal first. I caught up.

Gabrielė was the metalhead. Twelve years ago, when we had just started going out, she would send me the music she was listening to — we were teenagers, neither of us was driving yet, so it arrived one track at a time and I was the one asking who this was. The first was Three Days Grace, which the purists will tell you is not metal, and they are right, and it worked anyway. Skillet came next. Then everything else.

I was not starting from zero. I had Rammstein off MTV as a kid in the 2000s and thought it was the loudest thing ever made. But it took her sending me track after track to turn that into a habit. Years later, when I finally got my first car, the first thing I did was burn a CD of metal bangers for it, so there would be something we both loved playing whenever we drove anywhere. That is the moment it stopped being her music and became ours.

The first big one was a surprise. I bought tickets to Apocalyptica playing Metallica and did not tell her until we were on our way. She loved it. So did I. Hearing Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” played on four cellos is what made it our song — enough that it is engraved inside her engagement ring, and in 2022 it is what we had our first dance to. Some of the room knew what was coming. Most did not.

We went back to that same Metallica set six or seven years later. Not the same night, but a good one. The third time was Apocalyptica playing their own material, with Epica. In between: Rammstein in Vilnius, Five Finger Death Punch, Avenged Sevenfold, Bullet For My Valentine, Jinjer.

Then this July we drove to Warsaw with friends for System Of A Down. A Sunday, the nineteenth. Tens of thousands of people in one place, all of them moshing, all of them having the best night of their year — and nearly every one of them wearing a black shirt with a band on the front. Standing in that, the thought was not “I should sell shirts”. It was: this is where I belong.

Which is also the gap we kept coming back to. Everyone in that stadium already owns the band shirt. Nobody is selling them the rest of it — the Monday morning, the open-plan office, the DIY, the back that no longer forgives the pit the way it used to. We do not make band merch. We bring metal into daily life.

No band names, no band logos, no album art. Not because we are precious about it, but because ripping off the bands that got us here is a lousy way to run a shop that claims to love them.

So, who is “we”. Gabrielė and me. Every design concept is mine, and every one of them is original — nothing here is pulled off a sheet somebody else drew. By day I am a building-automation engineer, which means I program the heating and ventilation in office blocks, which is exactly as metal as it sounds. Gabrielė is the one who tells me when a joke does not land, and she writes half the emails we send. The inbox is mine: hello@moshtee.com comes to me, and I am the one who answers it.

One thing straight up, because we would want to know. We are in Lithuania. The designs are made here. A print partner in the United States prints them and ships them, so your order does not fly across an ocean — it is printed in the US and posted in the US. That is why it lands in days instead of weeks.

— Pavel & Gabrielė, MoshTee