Inside Alina Villasante’s World of Peace and Love

The genesis of the brand’s concept goes back to 1999, when Alina hosted her first annual “Love Party.” Although the parties involved many ladies, and sometimes pajamas, they were a lot more innocent than the name might imply. The concept was to get all of her friends and the people she loved together and celebrate. To help promote a feeling of positivity, she sketched out and made T-shirts with the concepts of peace, love and happiness… and her friends absolutely loved them.

The idea turned into commerce in 2008. Alina was married, and in the process of selling an aviation-service company she and the father of her children had started when the market crashed. “The timing was bad, and we didn’t know if the deal was going to go through,” she says. On top of that, Villasante had just bought a house in Miami Beach they had yet to move into and had ordered $50,000 American Apparel T-shirts, hoodies and even dog clothes, thinking of printing up the T-shirts her friends always loved with her newly found free time. Instead they couldn’t close. “The general leger was off, and it was right before Christmas, and we thought we were going to lose the deal,” she explains.

“When the pallets arrived, I thought, ‘What am I going to do with this?’” Villasante recalls. So she had them printed up with her now-famous affirmations and gave them to her popular high-school-age children instructing them to sell them as if their future financial life depended on it. “I told them to take this stuff and [sell it] because we’re going to lose everything. They wound up selling $35 T-shirts like hot cakes. “We made $85,000 in two weeks,” says Alina with a smile. “People were at the house, buying. It was a crazy time. The world was starving for goodness and good things, and that’s really how Peace Love World was born.”

With the help of a forensic accountant, the aviation company deal went through after the holidays, so not only did they have the payout from that, but also a model for an exciting new clothing business. The sudden success, however, was bittersweet for Villasante, who saw neighbors and friends having hardship because of the recession. “It was a very weird situation — I couldn’t celebrate what had just happened because I was watching all my friends go from [prosperity] to losing their houses,” she says. The stark contrast humbled Villasante and convinced her it was a message from above.

Villasante decided to start giving back. Her opportunity came when an earthquake hit in Haiti in 2010. She and a member of her design team headed to the grief-stricken island together with Partners in Health. “I didn’t know what I was getting myself into,” she recalls. “It was really rough. There were 50-some kids, mostly with special needs, living in tents on the dirt and cribs that resembled.