About
Our Founder — Tom Roesch
“Vital. From the Latin vita — life.
I spent 28 years measuring it.
I wasn’t prepared for what it looks like when it shatters.”
The Beginning
For 28 years as a Physician Assistant, I measured life in numbers. Pulse. Breath. Pressure. I knew how to read the signs of a body under stress — how to stabilize what was failing, how to hold steady when everything around me was not.
I was a man trained to handle crisis. And when this hit my own house, I was not prepared. Nothing prepares you. The world doesn’t slow down — it spins faster, and louder, and nothing you know how to do makes it stop. You show up to work. You smile at the right times. And underneath all of it, you are holding on by your fingernails, wondering how something this heavy can be invisible to everyone around you.
I was less prepared for what it looks like when the tranquility of a good life shatters — not in a patient’s chart, but in your own home, in the kind of pain no clinical training reaches. My daughter had been assaulted by a member of our community. She had protected me from knowing for longer than any child should have to protect a parent.
When she finally spoke, I didn’t have answers. I had grief, and anger, and the particular helplessness of a man trained to fix things that cannot be fixed. What I had — what I kept coming back to — was faith.
Faith & Conviction
Not the easy kind. The kind you grip when nothing else is left. The kind that says He is still good when the evidence feels like it argues otherwise.
I was raised in the church. Experiences there drove me away from it — but never away from believing. There is a difference, and it matters. The institution can fail you. The faith doesn’t have to. I am not a loud believer — I carry it quietly, in the way I work, in what I wear, in what I choose to build when the world hands me something I didn’t ask for. Vital Threads is that belief made visible, for everyone who knows exactly what I mean.
Real vitality doesn’t come from the body. It comes from what you hold onto when everything hurts. The word itself is the testimony.
Our Mission
A portion of every Vital Threads purchase goes directly to support families of children impacted by sexual abuse — helping offset the costs of mental health treatment while they navigate the trauma and stigma that follows.
I was a man trained to handle crisis. And when this hit my own house, I was not prepared. Nothing prepares you. The world doesn’t slow down — it spins faster, and louder, and nothing you know how to do makes it stop. You show up to work. You smile at the right times. And underneath all of it, you are holding on by your fingernails, wondering how something this heavy can be invisible to everyone around you.
This is not a side note. It is the inspiration, the backbone, and the entire embodiment of why this brand exists. Before there was a design, before there was a shirt, before there was a name — there was a family in pain and a father who refused to let that be the end of the story.
Every purchase helps a family. Ours. Yours. Or someone you will never meet but whose life is changed because you chose to wear what you believe. The shirt you buy doesn’t just say something — it does something. It funds the therapy session. It helps a parent keep the lights on while they hold their child together. It tells a survivor that strangers showed up for them. And for the person wearing it, it is a quiet act of witness — a way of saying, without a word, this is what I stand on, and I am not ashamed of it.
You may never know whose family you helped. That’s okay. We will.
My daughter is why this exists. My daughter’s story, not unlike the thousands before her, will not be the last. She has risen from the ashes like a phoenix from the flames. We intend to see that others can do the same.
Address It. Wear It. Mean It.