Canine couture

Crew Dog

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As a sophomore on the Yale lightweight crew in the spring of 2023, Constantine Polychronopoulos ’25 wanted the team’s annual custom t-shirts to be more adventurous than usual. He and a friend sketched up an idea for a shirt embroidered with an insouciant bipedal bulldog holding an oar. “It was something that would identify you as a member of the team on campus,” says  Polychronopoulos, “but you could go to Boston or New York and nobody would put that together. It’s more subtle and understated.” The team loved it, and soon other Yale teams were asking for their own version. Before long, Polychronopoulos had a partner, Coby Wagonfeld ’26, and a brand, Crew Dog.

Less than three years later, Crew Dog designs have expanded far beyond Yale to more than 90 college campuses, whose own mascots have been given the Crew Dog treatment (see above). And in recent months the company, which now has ten full-time employees, had been selling around four thousand shirts a month. For Polychronopoulos, what started as a side project has become his passion, at least for now. “We’re sort of taking it as it comes,” he says. “A year ago, what we’re doing now would have seemed pretty unrealistic. I want to keep that in mind going forward: You really don’t know what can happen.”