Grant Kratzer has always been creative. Growing up in Appleton in northeast Wisconsin, Kratzer studied art, played in bands and created merch for those bands—an early foreshadowing of his future pursuits with his clothing and lifestyle brand, Cheatin Snakes.
At the beginning of high school, at the urging of his art teacher, Kratzer transitioned to an arts-focused high school and concentrated on drawing and watercolor painting.
“It was like going to Hogwarts,” Kratzer says. “None of my friends from my normal high school knew anything about the art high school. But it was a totally different experience. I grew up in a kind of small town—art was not a big thing there, so it was cool to have that experience. After, I applied to art school on a whim. I just needed to get out of that town.”
He got into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which is widely regarded as one of the best art schools in the country. Kratzer calls the school “conceptual—and totally out of my wheelhouse.” He felt like SAIC wasn’t the right fit for him: “I felt like I didn’t understand anything that was going on. And nobody wanted to get jobs [after graduation], which freaked me out.”
So after a few semesters at art school, Kratzer snuck into a nearby school’s graduation where the commencement speaker was a Pixar animator. Kratzer introduced himself to the animator, and eventually the artist became Kratzer’s mentor and helped him create an animation portfolio. Katzer soon started school for animation and character design at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California.
In the past 10 years, Kratzer has worked in nearly every creative medium.
After college, he worked as a junior designer at men’s clothing supplier Urgent Gear, which he credits for giving him the skill set to create his brand Cheatin Snakes. Kratzer and his wife Emily moved back to Kansas City almost a decade ago, where he made ends meet by entering into—and always winning—skateboard designing contests. Kratzer then started illustrating for various magazines and newspapers, like ESPN and Portland Mercury, even illustrating a children’s book.
Never one to stop being creative in all forms, Kratzer began carving wooden action figures and created a whole series of Dennis Rodman heads with different haircuts. They went viral and rapper Macklemore even bought one. Around the same time, Kratzer started making bootleg T-shirts of his niche interests, like ’90s wrestling.
Unbeknownst to Kratzer, rockstar Post Malone’s stylist had been following him on social media. Soon Kratzer’s phone was blowing up with images of Malone performing in one of Kratzer’s T-shirts, a moment he calls a “turning point for everything.” It was life changing, he says. “It was the biggest shift of ‘clothes make sense.’”
Around that time, the Chiefs had won the Super Bowl (in 2020), and Kratzer made a collage-type T-shirt of the Super Bowl parade. “We went from like 100 orders to thousands of orders, and we lived in the smallest house you can imagine. We had my parents drive from Wisconsin to help us fill all these orders. That’s when we could finally afford to get a fulfillment center,” Kratzer says.
On a whim, Kratzer decided to change his Instagram name to Cheatin Snakes, based on the name of his father-in-law’s band from the ’70s. Soon, that’s how people would know him, his signature style and, eventually, his brand.
“Both of my parents are creative people,” Katzer says. “My dad’s a woodworker, and my mom can sew pretty much anything. So I grew up with this mentality of, ‘If you don’t see it out there, you can make it.’ I will figure out how to make anything, so I’ve always kind of had that DIY sense.” At that point, he was doing illustration-based shirts, prints, patches and pins.
When Covid hit, Kratzer and his wife Emily had just had their first baby and decided to go full force with the Cheatin Snakes brand, converting their garage into a makeshift studio. He began sending everything he was working on to Post Malone’s creative director. The relationship proved fruitful, and soon Kratzer was not only helping to style the musician but also creating the merch for his tours. Most recently, he designed much of the pre-album clothes Malone wore and the merch for the U.S. tour of Malone’s newest album, F-1 Trillion.
Now, even with Cheatin Snakes’ popularity soaring more than ever, Kratzer is still trying to find his footing within the brand.
“I like to think that Cheatin Snakes takes place in northern Wisconsin, where I’m from,” he says. “Camo and hunting, all of that stuff is kind of ingrained. I spent so much time trying to get away from Wisconsin, but I realize I love that stuff. It’s now taking it and owning it. I look at Cheatin Snakes as a punk-owned sporting goods store.”
Kratzer works out of the Cheatin Snakes studio in the Westside off of Southwest Boulevard, and though they aren’t open daily for the public, they often have pop-up events and collaborate with other local businesses. Their next event is with their next-door neighbor, tattoo shop The West End, for a community block party with other local vendors on Oct. 5.
“Now, Cheatin Snakes is a full clothing brand,” Kratzer says. “That’s the main focus. I always try to do certain things that aren’t just a T-shirt or hoodie. We made nightshirts once and a cheetah print trench coat last year. I’m always trying to do what I feel like is not offered for men, especially. That’s kind of why I wanted to start making clothes. I love thrifting and I always find the coolest jackets and stuff. Those always get mixed in. It doesn’t matter [the] gender. I wanted to bring that to Cheatin Snakes—you see what it could be, you make it your own and style it yourself. My immediate reaction to trends is that as soon as you can put a name to it, it’s already dead.”
Along with Malone’s merch, Cheatin Snakes has had collaborations with huge brands like Champion and Urban Outfitters, with more coming at the end of the year.
“The thing I’m chasing this year is I have a certain attachment to a lot of camo and hunting clothes. Now it’s like, how do you bring that to other people? Certain fits or certain patterns bring me back, remind me of something. I think that’s the inspiration right now—nostalgia, for lack of a better term,” Kratzer says.
In the meantime, Cheatin Snakes’ merchandise is available online and at their pop-ups, where anything goes. Earlier this summer, they had a pop-up with a DIY wrestling theme, and the party exploded in popularity. People were scavenging to find folding lawn chairs with the Cheatin Snakes bug logo that Kratzer had put around town for people to find in a fun-guerilla marketing tactic, getting tattoos of the mosquito logo at the tattoo shop next door and asking, if not demanding, where the wrestling match was.
“That [mosquito logo] is a Wisconsin reference,” Kratzer says. “We would always have these shirts when I was younger in the summertime. The Wisconsin state bird was the mosquito. It’s just a joke novelty shirt from Wisconsin. That’s the idea. The mosquitoes are annoying, but it’s become an endearing badge of honor at this point. I always use flies and mosquitoes because the idea of Cheatin Snakes is kind of like owning it. It’s kind of a punk thing, like the Hells Angels—you own the negative, and then it’s not so negative.”
