Why I created Clerked

Why I created Clerked

November 30, 2025

Working in a UK hospital teaches you many things — resilience, patience, manners, and how to function on three hours of sleep and a stale Pret sandwich.

What it doesn't teach you is how to slow down from the relentless healthcare pace.

After years of clinics that overran, on-calls that never quite ended, and the slow accumulation of patients you carry home in your head, I hit the wall that so many doctors quietly crash into: burnout.

But here's the part that surprised even me — burnout didn't end something.

It started something.

The day I picked up a pencil again

In the middle of that fog, creativity became the thing that pulled me out. I started doodling microbes, flowers, anatomical line art, and small moments of medical humour — the kind only someone who has spent a long time on the wards would catch.

Those sketches became designs. The designs became tees. The tees became Clerked.

Who Clerked is for

Clerked isn't another medical apparel store.

It's made for the people who recognise the small details of the job — the F1 trying to remember which form is which, the registrar running two clinics at once, the consultant signing the last letter at 8pm, the medical student wondering whether any of it will be worth it.

Things that show up across that whole arc:

• Reviewing scans before the MDT
• Writing the discharge letter you've already written ten times that week
• A junior asking you something at exactly the wrong moment, and you trying not to show it
• Realising the last meal you had was a biscuit at the nursing station

Everything in the shop is designed by someone who's spent a long career inside the system — and still wants to make something out of it that doesn't take itself too seriously.

What Clerked is, and isn't

• Designed by a doctor. No generic graphics. Every design comes from real life on the wards, in clinic, or somewhere between the two.
• Subtle. No huge logos. Clean designs you can wear off-duty, or under scrubs and a lab coat.
• Made to order. Nothing is printed until someone orders it. Less waste, smaller scale, more considered.
• Human. It isn't about perfection. It's about humour, identity, and the things medicine quietly squeezes out of us.

I wear most of these myself. If you're a medic, and you get it — welcome.

— From the Mess