FiveHumans

The FiveHumans "Needle Fact" T-shirt reads: "My syringe is not recreational."

SEATTLE – After he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1999, Seattleite Lee Fine recalls the awkward moments when people would spot him taking insulin injections.

In public places, he would try to be inconspicuous. But even so, he would catch people looking at him like "what are you doing?"

Fine decided to educate them. These days you'll often spot the 33-year-old in a T-shirt which reads: "My syringe is not recreational." He hopes it will initiate conversation and allow him to tell people more about diabetes, which thousands of children are diagnosed with each year in the United States.

Fine's built a company around addressing health topics that are sometime considered taboo to discuss. Along with his wife and three friends, he founded FiveHumans, a T-shirt company that makes bold statements about illnesses like autism, heart disease and cancer.

"Our mission from day one until today is pretty simple," he said. "We're trying to raise awareness and cure ignorance around a variety of causes."

Their shirts, which look hip enough to be found on the racks of most retail stores, are emblazoned with statistics and facts. A shirt about heart disease reads "Number one killer in America." A baby blue woman's tee about autism reads "One in 150 children are diagnosed" and "there is no cure."

And one T-shirt, a best-seller that Fine says always attracts comments, simply reads: "Ignorance is a curable disease."

"The truth is, by raising awareness, we can certainly change a lot of statistics, the bad statistics that exist today," Fine said. "Heart disease is the number one killer among men and women, but there are a lot of preventative things we can do."

Fine and his friend Dan Grunvald got the idea for the company back in 2001, but it wasn't until 2007 that FiveHumans was launched.

"The idea didn't really come alive until my wife said, 'you've always talked about this, you need to do it,'" Fine said.

He recruited his wife, who has a marketing background. Other team members have experience in sales, marketing and e-commerce.

"We've got a pretty diverse background," Fine said. "We knew we had the right people to make this happen."

The group now sells shirts and hats with messages about asthma, cancer, heart disease and autism. They recently decided to poll users on their Web site to get an idea of what health issue to tackle next, and they got an overwhelming response from supporters of "noonies."

"Noonan syndrome is a little bit related to Down syndrome, but it's a very unknown disease," Fine said. "They are a small little group that has just wrapped their arms around this and gone crazy wanting us to produce shirts for them."

FiveHumans

The woman's "Mind Speak" T-shirt about autism reads "Most insurance companies do not cover the cost of therapy."

FiveHumans' other goal is to donate money to charitable organizations related to their cause. While they're a for-profit company, they donate 10 percent of the cost of each T-shirt to organizations like the American Lung Association and the Seattle University College of Nursing.

"Our intention, is to raise a ton of money toward nonprofit partners," Fine said

And they'll keep educating people about the causes that they believe in.

"It's been a very exciting journey so far," Fine said. "Hopefully it will be a long one."