Our Story

Manifesto:

"Give this world good energy."

This quote was written 7 years ago, days before this journey begun.
Scribbled on a piece of scrap paper and stuck above my bed head, it served as a daily reminder of what I envisioned myself creating. At the time, I was struggling to find my place in this world and was completely unhappy with the direction my life was taking, so I dropped out of University, quit my job and disassociated myself from everyone and everything.

For roughly 6 months I stayed in my room. I googled how I was feeling and it quickly came to light that I was depressed. The days merged into one and I lost all enthusiasm to function.

The strange thing about depression are the random bursts of energy that appear of out nowhere, and all of a sudden you are gifted with the motivation to build a plane, save the world and write a 50,000 word essay about socks. Well, on that particular day, I woke up, and decided to clean my room. I found Wiz Khalifa’s mixtape and heard the song “The Statement” and the chorus went;
“This ain't the life that we chose, But it's the life that we living, Know we belong on the top, We'll get there in a minute, and we'll get there in a minute”

While the song continued to play, I remember staring at the quote stuck on my wall and I suddenly had the urge to pick myself up from my slumber. I immediately started searching online for websites that specialise in keeping people afloat emotionally, but after hours of searching, I found nothing. I then read an article about Tumblr and decided to give it a try.

I launched my Tumblr blog KushandWizdom, on the 11th March 2011 and I created the first picture quote, by using photoshop to add text to a photograph of Wiz Khalifa that I sourced from Google. The next day, I woke up to thousands of new followers and hundreds of messages. People were either requesting more quotes to be made, or leaving testimonials of how the quote made them feel.
For two years, I continued creating picture quotes and the audience on Tumblr grew to 5 million.  Little did I know, that by creating picture quotes, the way we communicate our emotions as a generation changed. From avoiding conversations about how we feel emotionally, to simply sharing a quote via social media or changing our display pictures with a quote that matches our current emotional state, we inform the people around us about how we feel.

I once received a message on Facebook from a mother, whose daughter was suicidal. She informed me that while she was browsing through her daughters computer, she found a folder called “Happiness” and it was filled with positive quotes from my blog. She told me that her daughter recently attempted suicide and said regardless of what had happened, at one stage her daughter was happy, and my quotes played a huge role in that.

My platform became the safe place I once searched for.
Millions of people visited my blog for their daily dose of inspiration and that became a huge responsibility. I decided to change the quality of the content and stopped publishing music quotes. I partnered with young lightworkers/writers internationally and we began creating inspiring content written in our dialect, with the aim to form a stronger connection with our millennial audience.

In 2013, I was introduced to my business partner, Wale Kalejaiye, and we moved the platform over to Instagram and rebranded to “TheGoodQuote”.

TheGoodStore began in 2014, directly after the launch of TheGoodQuote on Instagram. We wanted to create products to ensure that our TheGoodVibeTribe were able to take their affirmations with them.