I made two things. A hat and a t-shirt. Both carry the infinity symbol. Both are live on Grovetop.com.
Most autism merchandise looks like it was designed by a hospital marketing department. Puzzle pieces on a blue background. Awareness ribbons. Clip art fonts. The whole genre screams "condition" instead of "identity." I wanted something I would actually wear.
The hat is a distressed dad hat with a gold infinity symbol patch. No puzzle pieces. No blue. No rainbow — a deliberate choice, because the rainbow version of the symbol carries baggage in parts of the autistic community that I did not want to import. Gold is the color the community chose for itself. Au on the periodic table. Same element, same thread as the shirt. The infinity symbol is the neurodiversity symbol — chosen by the autistic community itself, not assigned to it. That distinction matters. The distressed look is intentional. It is not supposed to look clinical. It is supposed to look lived-in, because that is what this is. Lived experience, not a diagnosis code.
AU-THENTIC
The t-shirt says AU-THENTIC across the back. Au is the chemical symbol for gold. The hyphen is deliberate. The word means what it has always meant — real, genuine, not performing — but the prefix reframes it. Au-thentic. Gold-standard authentic. The kind that does not need to explain itself.
The infinity symbol sits below the text. Same rainbow palette. Same intent.
I wrote about trading bits for atoms back in December. The thesis was simple: when AI makes digital output nearly free, the people who will hold value are the ones making real things. Physical things with consequence. I did not realize at the time that the first atoms I would ship would carry the symbol of the thing I had just discovered about myself.
Why These Exist
I got diagnosed late. Forty-five years of pattern-matching without the pattern. When I finally had the word, the first thing I wanted was to see it reflected back at me in the world. Not in a textbook. Not in a support group pamphlet. In the ordinary fabric of daily life.
The merch I found was not that. It was awareness merch. It was designed for allies, not for the people living it. Light It Up Blue campaigns and puzzle piece keychains that reduce a neurological identity to a children's charity aesthetic. I am not against awareness. I am against awareness that looks like it was designed without consulting the people it claims to represent.
So I made what I wanted to see. A hat that looks like a hat. A shirt that says something without explaining everything. Products that carry the symbol without turning the person wearing them into a walking infographic.
GroveTop Studio
These are the first neurodiversity products from GroveTop Studio. The studio started as a craft and design operation out of Oak Haven — the same 35-acre property where everything else gets built. The physical products are an extension of the same principle that drives the digital work: build things that reflect how you actually think, not how the market expects you to think.
More will follow. But these two came first because they had to. The hat and the shirt are not product launches. They are declarations.
The Protocol: The autism merch aisle is full of things designed by people who do not live it. I wanted something I would actually wear — that carries the right symbol, chosen by the community, without the clinical packaging. So I built it. A hat. A shirt. Two atoms. That is the whole point of trading bits for atoms — making real things that say real things.
