Family is Everything to Local Entrepreneurs

If you live in the Needham area, you may have seen people around town wearing T-shirts with a simple message: “Family is Everything.” What you may not know, though, is that the idea behind these shirts was born right here in Needham by in-laws Richard and Dorothy DiNatale, who continue to spread their message about the importance of family on the T-shirts they design and manufacture.

“This was born when everything went bad with the economy and life wasn’t so good anymore, but family was still everything to everybody,” Dorothy said.

It was Christmas 2005. Nephew Tyler Jewell, the son of Richard’s sister Jean, had just made the U.S. Olympic snowboarding team and would soon be going to Torino, Italy, to compete. Jean made what at the time probably seemed like a simple toast: “la famiglia e tutto,” which is Italian for “family is everything.” Richard remembers the night fondly.

“Maybe I had too many glasses of wine,” he said with a smile, “but I just thought it was a great idea. That spring I hired a lawyer and I trademarked ‘family is everything.’ I had no idea if I was ever going to get it, and three, maybe six months later, I get something in the mail along with a bill from the lawyer telling me, ‘congratulations, you got the trademark.’”

Prior to getting the trademark, though, the DiNatales tried out the shirts themselves. Jean has another son, Craig, who has a T-shirt business in Atlanta, and he printed out some white pinnies with the slogan in Italian that the family wore in Torino at the Olympic Games. When they got back home they played around with a number of different ideas and designs, but they couldn’t seem to come up with anything.

“We had no structure,” Richard said. “We had no business plan. We had nothing. For whatever reason, we didn’t sell any shirts. We kept toying around with the idea. Then we [he and wife Siobhan] had a baby, which we lost, and that kind of started everything with me on a more personal level.”

Richard has been a private investigator for 35 years, and Dorothy works in the office doing much of the research. Richard said he hates sitting around in an office and likes to go out on the road to do the legwork. He has gone to a few fairs and set up a booth to show off their products, and he loves that aspect of starting up Family is Everything.

“Keep in mind, I work all week, all day, as Dorothy does,” Richard said. “I work pretty hard. We have a service business. Service is pretty important. All of a sudden on a Saturday, I’d just as soon be playing golf or fishing or doing something and I’m lugging these boxes to a fair and spending my day there, which I like because I love dealing with people walking by. I love getting their feel for what their whole take is.”

The DiNatales say they’ve just scratched the surface so far in terms of what they plan on doing with Family is Everything. They have some ideas of some more fairs they plan to set up at to draw attention to their T-shirts. Also, the Italian T-shirt has been such a big hit that they’ve explored offering shirts in other languages, including Spanish, Russian and Portuguese; however, they say they want to get a good feel for their English products first to ensure they won’t have too many T-shirts sitting on the shelves in inventory.

Still, the local entrepreneurs say they’ve had more sales so far this year than the last two years combined, and they hope to continue that success and build more for the future.

“I think what makes us unique is that we aren’t just one family business; we’re two family businesses,” Dorothy said. “The primary business, the detective agency, is the family business, and now we’ve branched out and included even more members of the family in the Family is Everything business. I think ideally, my hope some day is that we can bring all of our children in and that this truly can be a bigger family business. I think in this day and age that would be something phenomenal.”

For more information on Family is Everything, visit their Web site, at familyiseverything.com.