About Us

So you know who you are dealing with or buying from, the founder is James Hart. A background in accounting and business consulting with a yearning to do something a bit more exciting.



In case you haven't worked it out by now it's a play on words for the slang term arse-about which generally means backwards. Some of you might know it as ass-about. We would show the phonetic way of saying it, however, if you can't get it from the previous couple of sentences you probably wouldn't get the phonetic stuff either.



Why, over a few beers of course. Best to get it straight from the horse's mouth so to speak. Let's ask one of the owners, James Hart, how it came about. "Well it all started in Las Vegas whilst I was on holiday with a mate. As any visitor to sin city will agree, time is meaningless there. Because we didn't plan too far in advance we usually had to change hotels each night. Also because we were too mean and poor to pay for a decent room. The problem was that we would get back to the hotel around 9am to 10am after being out all night and then having breakfast. This didn't leave much time for sleeping because a quick shower and before we knew it, it was checkout time. We would then source a new hotel for the next night but the room wouldn't be available until at least 3pm. So that meant sleeping in the car in the hotel carpark until we could check in. Nice and warm in the Las Vegas sun.

Out of every problem comes an opportunity and we came up with the idea of a hotel that reverses the check-in and check-out times. Because it was backwards to other hotels it was going to be called the Arse About Hotel. Actually, being the dreamers we were, it was going to be a chain of hotels.

The idea never went any further for obvious reasons. The main one being we didn't have enough money to do it. Neither of us had Hilton or Marriott for a surname. Fast forward about ten years and I was thinking about doing some action sports oriented apparel and other goods. The name seemed like a good one, the name was bought, the trademark was granted, and the rest is history."