If you've followed MDMotivator since the early days, you might remember a brand called Club 143. The hoodies, the "Kindness Changes Everything" graphics, the tagline-driven merchandise that quietly funded his mission. For longtime fans, Club 143 was the first sign that Zachery Dereniowski's project wasn't just content — it was a whole worldview, with a wardrobe to match.

Newer fans probably haven't heard of Club 143 at all. The brand has been almost entirely supplanted in MDMotivator's modern ecosystem by Kindness Is Cool and its merchandise arm, The Kind Closet. But the lineage matters, and the story of how the early branding evolved into what exists today is one of the more telling windows into how MDMotivator has grown up as a project.

Here's the full evolution.

What Club 143 Was

Club 143 was launched on September 12, 2022 by Zachery as a clothing brand and community hub built around a single core idea: kindness changes everything.

The name itself was a love letter, literally. 143 is texting code for I love you — one letter for "I," four letters for "love," three letters for "you." It dates back to pager culture in the 1990s and has had a quiet life in internet shorthand ever since. For Zachery, naming his brand around it was a deliberate choice. The whole project, from the first viral TikTok to the most recent Slingshot campaign, has been about telling people they matter. 143 was a way of putting that into the brand mark itself.

Club 143's stated mission, per the original brand materials, was to drive awareness of mental health and build a community of people committed to the idea that kindness changes everything. The merchandise — hoodies, tees, accessories — was the financial mechanism. According to the original launch materials, 100% of profits were committed back into Zachery's videos and his work spreading kindness.

It was, in retrospect, the prototype of everything that came later.

What Kindness Is Cool Became

Roughly a year after Club 143 launched, the broader brand consolidated. Kindness Is Cool was registered as a nonprofit in late 2023, with a clothing line launching on December 1 of that year. The merchandise moved to The Kind Closet at thekindcloset.com.

Several pieces of the original Club 143 worldview carried over directly:

What changed was the framing. Club 143 sounded like a small inside-fan brand — meaningful to people who knew the reference, opaque to people who didn't. Kindness Is Cool is broader, more direct, and more legible to a mainstream audience. You don't have to know any internet shorthand to understand it.

That shift mirrored MDMotivator's own trajectory. In late 2022, Zachery was a viral creator with a meaningful following but not yet a household name in the way he is now. By late 2023, he was working with major brands, planning celebrity collaborations, and scaling his giving operation into six-figure individual campaigns. The brand needed to scale with him, and Club 143 was a name designed for the earlier moment.

What Happened to Club 143

The original Club 143 site (club143bymd.com) is no longer active as a primary storefront. The brand effectively merged into Kindness Is Cool / The Kind Closet, and the merchandise that fans buy today is sold under those names rather than under the Club 143 banner.

That's not unusual for creator-led brands. Most evolve their naming as they grow. The Club 143 era was a 12–14 month chapter that did its job: established the worldview, funded the early giving work, and seeded the design DNA that the modern brand still uses.

Fans who own original Club 143 merchandise are essentially holding artifacts from MDMotivator's pre-fame chapter. Worth keeping.

The "Kindness Changes Everything" Throughline

The phrase that connects both eras is Kindness Changes Everything. It was the tagline of Club 143 in 2022 and remains the secondary tagline of Kindness Is Cool today. You'll see it stitched onto current Kind Closet merchandise alongside the primary Kindness Is Cool mark.

Why both phrases? Because they do different work. Kindness Is Cool is descriptive — it's a statement about what kindness is. Kindness Changes Everything is causal — it's a claim about what kindness does. Together they form a small worldview: kindness is desirable, and kindness has real consequences. We covered this in more detail in our article on MDMotivator's catchphrases.

That linguistic continuity is one of the clearest signals that Club 143 wasn't replaced so much as it was absorbed. The clothes in your closet from 2022 carry the same message as the clothes for sale today.

Why the Evolution Matters

Most fans interacting with MDMotivator's content in 2026 will never encounter the Club 143 name. The brand has effectively retired. But understanding the history matters for a few reasons.

First, it makes clear that the modern Kindness Is Cool brand isn't a manufactured marketing operation built after Zachery got famous. It's the second iteration of a brand he started early in his career, when the project was small and the merchandise was a way to fund the videos. That continuity is what gives the current branding its credibility.

Second, the 143 origin story is genuinely lovely. A creator who builds his entire merchandise brand around the texting code for I love you is, by his actions, telling you what he thinks the work is for. The fact that the modern brand evolved past the name doesn't change what the name said about the worldview.

Third, knowing the history equips fans to spot the design DNA. The visual language of current Kindness Is Cool merchandise — the typography, the simple direct phrasing on the front, the affirmation-style messaging on the back — was largely established in the Club 143 era. The brand has matured, but it didn't reinvent itself.

Where to Buy Today

If you want current MDMotivator-branded merchandise, the active storefront is The Kind Closet at thekindcloset.com. The product line includes hoodies, sweatpants, tees, and accessories, all branded with some combination of Kindness Is Cool and Kindness Changes Everything. Per the brand's stated commitment, proceeds support the recipients featured in Zachery's videos and the broader work of his foundations.

The original club143bymd.com is, as of this writing, no longer a primary storefront. If you're a Club 143 collector with original merchandise, you've got something fans of the future will probably ask about. Take care of it.

Coming Up Next

The Club 143 → Kindness Is Cool evolution is the merchandising side of MDMotivator's broader brand story. The full story of the nonprofit, the giving infrastructure, and how Kindness Is Cool became an entire ecosystem is told in our dedicated article on Kindness Is Cool.

Sources

This article is part of an independent fan site dedicated to documenting the work, life, and impact of Zachery Dereniowski (MDMotivator). We are not affiliated with Zachery, his team, Kindness Is Cool, the Mental Health Movement, the KindnessWithZachery Foundation, or any of his sponsors. All content is researched and written by fans, sourced from public material, and intended as celebratory and informational. To follow Zachery directly, visit @mdmotivator on TikTok or Instagram.