Who Is Jordan Childs? Richmond’s Brand Designer, Shine Craft Founder, and the Career Behind the Name

Who Jordan Childs Is?

Jordan Childs (Richmond, VA) is an entrepreneur, brand designer, and adjunct faculty instructor at VCU Brandcenter. A 2009 graduate of VCU’s Brandcenter master’s program, he founded Shine Craft Vessel Co. — a premium stainless steel growler brand — in 2014, built its client list to include national names like Blue Moon Brewing Co., Urban Outfitters, and Nordstrom, then sold it to a California couple in December 2020. He currently operates Major Easy, a brand design consultancy, and co-founded Eastern Land Collective in Richmond with his wife Kim in 2014.

If you’ve already searched his name and landed on a job-title page or a public records aggregator, that’s the context gap this profile is designed to fill.

Jordan Childs Richmond VA is a name that surfaces across the craft beer, design, and Richmond creative communities. According to Richmond BizSense, Childs left his marketing role at the LEGO Group in Connecticut and moved back to Richmond, where he founded Shine Craft Vessel Co. and was named a Ledbury Launch Fund finalist within his first year — a competition that drew 146 startup applicants from across the country. He currently teaches at VCU Brandcenter, which The Drum ranked the #1 advertising graduate program in the world in 2022.

To connect with or research Jordan Childs professionally, follow these steps:

1. Search Major Easy — his active brand design consultancy — for current client work and contact options.
2. Check VCU Brandcenter’s faculty listings at brandcenter.vcu.edu for his academic profile.
3. Review Shine Craft Vessel Co.’s archived brand presence for his product design and wholesale background.
4. Look into Eastern Land Collective for his Richmond co-working and community-building work.
5. Search LinkedIn for professional updates and direct outreach.

The Career Before Shine Craft: From LEGO to Church Hill

Most profiles on Jordan Childs start the clock in 2014 — when he moved back to Richmond — and skip everything that came before. That backstory matters more than those profiles suggest.

Childs enrolled at VCU Brandcenter in 2007, where he met his wife Kim, a Richmond native. After graduating in 2009, the couple spent time working with major brands and ad agencies in New York and San Francisco before returning to Richmond in 2014 to launch their own ventures. That compressed summary, accurate as it is, leaves out the specific professional infrastructure he was building during those years.

Before Richmond, he completed a brand experience internship at Jack Morton Worldwide and a design strategy thesis at Hamilton Beach Brands. He then joined Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners as an account executive before moving to the LEGO Group — first as Marketing Manager for Brand Retail North America, then as Senior Marketing Manager for Branded Retail Marketing. LEGO describes itself as the world’s second-largest toy maker. That’s not a small-scale brand environment.

He didn’t have a plan when he left, he didn’t have a product yet, and he hadn’t proven a thing in the Richmond market — but he had nearly a decade of brand and marketing experience at the highest consumer level, and that foundation was about to matter a great deal.

He quit in October and moved back to Church Hill with Kim. Neither one had a set plan for what they were going to do.

What most profiles skip entirely is that pre-Richmond arc — the LEGO years, the San Francisco agency work, the Hamilton Beach thesis. Those experiences directly shaped how Childs approached building Shine Craft as a brand, not just a product.

Shine Craft Vessel Co.: What It Was and What It Built

The founding premise was direct. Childs liked craft beer and good design, and he couldn’t find a growler that satisfied both. “I wanted to make a growler that could go on a table at a dinner party and not be an obstruction, but be a conversation piece,” he said.

That instinct — treating a functional object as a designed artifact rather than a container — turned out to be exactly right.

The first batch of 100 growlers sold out in two weeks.

Shine Craft operated from Richmond’s Scott’s Addition neighborhood and positioned itself as a premium drinkware brand for breweries and retailers. The double-walled, vacuum-sealed stainless steel growlers were built to keep cold items cold for 24 hours and hot items hot for ten hours, with a design language aimed at outdoor audiences who still wanted a quality craft beer experience deep in the woods.

The differentiator — and the commercial reason Shine grew — was in how every order was handled. “The difference for Shine was we treated each order as a creative project,” Childs said. “Every order had custom illustration on it.” That’s a labor-intensive approach to manufacturing, and it kept work local — sixty percent of production, including design, painting, finishing, and custom logoing, stayed in Richmond.

By the time Childs sold the company, the client list had grown to include Blue Moon Brewing Co., Breckenridge Brewery, Urban Outfitters, and Nordstrom — most of which he said he secured by cold-calling.

That last detail is worth pausing on. A lot of founders earn credit for a well-designed product. Fewer are acknowledged for the relentless, unglamorous sales work that turns a good product into a national-scale brand. The cold-call approach is the more interesting part of the story.

The Ledbury Launch Fund: Early Validation on a National Stage

In 2014, Shine Craft Vessel Co. was named one of three finalists in the Ledbury Launch Fund — a competition run by Ledbury, the Shockoe Bottom-based menswear brand, designed to give a capital injection to consumer product startups. The other finalists that year were Kuli Kuli, a California food company, and Thread, a Pittsburgh firm making fabric from recycled materials.

Being selected among 146 national applicants, less than a year into operation, gave Shine Craft its first meaningful external validation — and put Childs on Richmond’s entrepreneurial radar at a moment when the city’s maker scene was gaining real momentum.

Eastern Land Collective: The Richmond Studio That Gets Overlooked

Here’s the thing: almost every profile of Jordan Childs either buries Eastern Land Collective in a single sentence or skips it entirely. That’s a meaningful gap.

Jordan and Kim Childs returned to Richmond in 2014 to launch their own ventures — and Eastern Land Collective was part of that from the start. The Collective served as a Richmond-based studio housing a half-dozen retail and trade businesses, with Shine Craft Vessel operating as one of its anchor tenants.

Or maybe I should say it this way — the Collective wasn’t a side project to Shine Craft. It was a parallel infrastructure project built on the same design philosophy: create something that serves more people than just yourself.

Running a consumer product company and a creative co-working hub simultaneously, in the same inaugural year back in Richmond, suggests the return from Connecticut wasn’t just about launching one brand. It was about planting something in the city’s creative ecosystem.

Most data-aggregator profiles on Childs completely miss this dimension. It’s the part of his story that matters most to Richmond’s creative community and to anyone trying to understand him as a collaborator rather than just a founder.

VCU Brandcenter and Major Easy: What Jordan Childs Does Now

Childs began serving as adjunct faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2019 — the year before he sold Shine Craft. He didn’t wait for the exit to start giving back to the program that trained him.

VCU Brandcenter is a graduate-level program awarding a Master of Science in business, with concentrations spanning art direction, copywriting, strategy, creative brand management, and experience design. The program is highly collaborative and project-based, designed to simulate a real-world agency and client setting. The Drum ranked it the #1 advertising graduate program in the world in 2022.

Teaching there from a position of having founded, operated for six years, and sold a consumer brand gives Childs a specific kind of practical authority. He described it plainly in his exit interview with Richmond BizSense: “You could probably interview one of my students and they’ll be like, ‘Oh we’re sick of hearing about all the mistakes you made or the things you learned with Shine.’ I got a degree in how not to do things, while simultaneously developing this company.”

That’s a more useful teaching position than most instructors have. Failure as curriculum, delivered by someone who can also point to a successful exit.

Look — if you’re a VCU design student researching who you’re learning from, or a Richmond entrepreneur evaluating a potential collaborator, the relevant profile is: founder with a verified exit, brand designer with national wholesale accounts, and active educator at one of the top-ranked advertising programs in the world. That combination is less common than the job titles make it sound.

After the sale of Shine Craft, Childs launched Major Easy as his primary professional vehicle. The consultancy applies the brand strategy and visual identity work he developed at Shine to client-facing projects — a shift from building a consumer brand to serving other brands.

Some observers would argue, reasonably, that Shine Craft’s growth from 2014 to 2018 benefited from the broader craft beer growler market surge during that period — and riding category momentum isn’t the same as creating it. That’s a fair point for 2014. But the client roster Childs assembled by 2020 (national retailers, multi-state brewery groups) and the custom illustration model he built around repeat wholesale orders were deliberate decisions, not defaults. The category opened doors. What he put behind those doors was his.

Quick Comparison: Jordan Childs’ Professional Ventures

Shine Craft Vessel Co. vs. Major Easy

Shine Craft was Childs’ direct-to-consumer and wholesale product brand — built on visual identity and custom illustration, sold to end users and national retailers. Major Easy is his current B2B design consultancy, working with other brands rather than building one of his own. The key difference is audience: Shine Craft served consumers and buyers; Major Easy serves clients seeking brand strategy and design.

Five Questions People Actually Ask About Jordan Childs

Who is Jordan Childs from Richmond, VA?

Jordan Childs is a Richmond-based entrepreneur, brand designer, and VCU Brandcenter adjunct faculty instructor. He founded Shine Craft Vessel Co. in 2014, sold it in 2020, and now runs Major Easy, a brand design consultancy, while continuing to teach at VCU.

What is Shine Craft Vessel Co.?

Shine Craft Vessel Co. was a Richmond-based premium stainless steel growler brand founded by Childs in 2014. Its client list grew to include Blue Moon Brewing Co., Breckenridge Brewery, Urban Outfitters, and Nordstrom. Childs sold it to a California couple in December 2020.

Does Jordan Childs teach at VCU Brandcenter?

Yes, Childs has served as adjunct faculty at VCU Brandcenter since 2019 — the same master’s program where he earned his degree in 2009. The Drum ranked VCU Brandcenter the #1 advertising graduate program in the world in 2022.

What is Eastern Land Collective in Richmond, VA?

Eastern Land Collective is a Richmond creative co-working studio co-founded by Jordan and Kim Childs in 2014. It housed several retail and trade businesses and served as the operational home for Shine Craft Vessel Co. during its early years.

What is Major Easy?

Major Easy is Jordan Childs’ brand design consultancy, launched in 2020 following the Shine Craft sale. It focuses on brand strategy and visual identity services for other businesses — marking his shift from founder-operator to design consultant.