How Saint Javelin grew from a meme to raising $2 million for Ukraine

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was the most important topic of 2022 across the world and a shocking event in the life of Ukrainians. Ukraine’s largest news publishers like Suspline or The Kyiv Independent stepped in to cover the war for Ukrainians and people across the world, but the war also gave birth to more unconventional media projects.

Saint Javelin is especially interesting – it grew from one meme to one of the biggest charity projects for Ukraine’s war effort. The Fix spoke with its founder Christian Borys and marketing & communications manager Julia Tymoshenko about the project’s work, charity, and the role of the war memes for foreign audiences.

$2 million fundraiser for Ukraine started from a sticker

Saint Javelin’s Instagram account was created shortly before February 24th by Christian Borys, a Canadian marketer and former journalist of Ukrainian descent. When the first news about a possible Russian attack began to flow, Borys, who had covered the war in Ukraine for news outlets like Vice and the BBC in 2014-2019, understood that this time the predictions would come true. 

At the beginning of @saintjavelin’s life, Borys mainly shared screenshots of news, commenting on it sometimes in a funny way, to raise awareness among the international community, he told The Fix.

The charity project, which eventually went on to collect more than $2 million for Ukraine in 2022, started with Saint Javelin’s $10 stickers sales. Borys hired Ukrainian designer Evgeniy Shalashov to rework an already viral painting ”Madonna Kalashnikov” by American artist Chris Shaw. In the redesigned version, Madonna is holding a Javelin anti-tank missile instead of a Kalashnikov rifle.

On February 24th, to sell the stickers online and support Ukrainian orphans, Borys created a website saintjavelin.com. “I put it up on my Instagram, asking if anybody wants this as a sticker and a bunch of people messaged me. Then I just built a website that night, and then everything just kind of went crazy after that”, he told The Fix. 

The initial fundraising goal was $30,000, but in just one month Borys raised $1 million selling Ukraine-themed merchandise, he said in an interview for The Kyiv Independent.

Borys remembered that until May 2022 only he and a couple of volunteers were running Saint Javelin: “I couldn’t do it myself anymore. I wasn’t sleeping, it was way too much, so then we hired a bunch of people”, eventually almost two dozen. In December 2022, 14 out of 20 Saint Javelin’s team members were working from Canada or Europe. The rest stayed in Ukraine and the company planned to hire more people there, Borys told The Fix.

There are two people in the team responsible for the whole logistics on the charity side of the project. Saint Javelin cooperates with organisations like Ukrainian World Congress, HelpUsHelp and 2402fund, which is supporting journalists in Ukraine. As Borys told us, it took them 20 hours  to work out the most efficient way to distribute help to Ukraine. Transparency is key in such a large-scale charity operation, he underlined in The Kyiv Independent interview.

All of Saint Javelin’s profits come from merchandise online sales and they haven’t yet considered social media accounts or the website as a space for paid advertising, Julia Tymoshenko, Marketing and Communications manager at Saint Javelin, told The Fix. “About half of our sales at this point have gone towards donations, towards things that we’ve purchased and stuff like that”, added Borys. The rest goes towards funding Saint Javelin’s operations.

Saint Javelin cooperates with information pages, media, and organisations that correspond to their values, Tymoshenko told The Fix. For example, in December 2022 Saint Javelin launched a joint merch collection with The Kyiv Independent to help Hospitalliers, a Ukrainian paramedics organisation. In the first sales month they’ve managed to collect $7,500. That month also the first live charity event organised by Saint Javelin took place in Toronto.

In just one year Saint Javelin designed multiple collections of merch, telling about the war in Ukraine through the most famous symbols, often in the context of Western pop culture and with humour. For example, “The Winter is Coming”, ”Nafo Fellas”, “Slava Ukraini” and “The Saints”, which includes stuff not only with Saint Javelin’s image.

Saint Javelin aims to produce 50% of its items in Ukraine. Borys said in an interview with us that they care about quality and are inspired by the Patagonia brand, which is famous for its sustainable fashion business model. Saint Javelin’s clothes were even recognized by Volodymyr Zelensky, who received it as a gift. Later, Saint Javelin designed a collection inspired by Ukraine’s President.

Memes as a weapon

Four people operate the project’s Instagram, Twitter, and a recently created YouTube channel. Among them, there is a content curator who collects materials from various open sources: Telegram channels, Twitter, TikTok, and rarely from other Instagram pages.

“We see a lot of specific content, including quite sensitive and explicit, which we need to filter. Also, we try never to post content that could harm Ukraine or discourage Ukrainians. On the contrary, we want most of our publications to raise the spirits of both Ukrainians and foreigners who support Ukraine”, Tymoshenko explained to The Fix.

In May, when Saint Javelin hired paid staff, the Twitter account became active, although the account had been registered since February 2022. Promoting the account to followers of the founder’s personal account, which was quite big at that time, helped grow the account quickly, Borys told The Fix. As of January 2023, he has 41,300 subscribers on his private account @ItsBorys.

As a former reporter in Ukraine, Borys remembers that before 2022, the war in Ukraine used to be a very serious topic and people made a lot of political memes instead. “I think that in a perfect world, somebody sees one of our memes and is so interested in what the story is about that they actually read an article from The Kyiv Independent or whoever it might be. But the reality is that most of the time people are just scrolling on Instagram looking for clothes or something like that, and by coincidence, they also see Saint Javelin, and at least they have some idea of what’s happening in Ukraine”,  Borys told The Fix.

However, a big part of Saint Javelin’s posts are original, especially among the most viral ones, Borys told The Fix. The most popular video in 2022 both on Instagram and Twitter was posted by Saint Javelin on the day of the Kerch bridge detonation in October, showing a happy crowd singing “Kerch Bridge on fire! Your defense is terrified!”.