58 | NOVEMBER 30 • 2023 
J
N

GIFT GUIDE

M

ad Patches owner 
Taylor Weintraub 
grew up in 
Farmington Hills and moved 
to Atlanta after college to be 
a teacher. There she met her 
husband, Ross Weintraub. 
After 10 years, they moved 
back, and she has now pivoted 
her career from teaching to 
painting custom-made painted 
gifts, anything from denim 
jackets to blankets, T-shirts and 
sweatshirts. 
The idea of starting up an 
at-home painting business came 
to her when she and her friends 
started having babies and were 
looking for unique baby gifts. 
Painting and art had always 
been a hobby for Weintraub, 
and she used art and painting 
as a theme for her bat mitzvah. 
Craftiness comes in the family 
as her mother had a customized 
painted gift business for many 
years before she retired. 
“I first started out by painting 
a denim jacket for my son, 
and I thought, ‘I bet I can 
do this even better and paint 

designs for other people.
’ And 
now, I have been doing this for 
several years and orders come in 
from all over the country,
” she 
said. 
Most of the business she 
generates is on her Etsy shop 
(https://tinyurl.com/589f56xs) 
which she opened in 2018. 
As the mother of a pres-
chooler, she paints when her 
son is at preschool or when he is 
napping. 
Weintraub remembers her 
mother creating patches to 
sew on denim, which was very 
trendy when she was growing 
up in the 1990s. But what she 
likes to paint most now are 
denim jackets — but instead 
of painting the logos of album 
covers or bands like teens liked 
in the 1980s, Weintraub can 
paint characters of superheroes 
or princesses and personalize it 
with a child’s name. 
“My specialty is denim jackets,
” 
Weintraub said. “I’
d say that’s 
mostly what I specialize in. That’s 
definitely what I sell the most 
of. I’ve recently started moving 
into some other things like 
flannel button-downs 
and hats, and 
sneakers and 
backpacks.
” 

Custom-painted denim 
jackets make a great 
gift for Chanukah.

Mad 
Patches

STACY GITTLEMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Items available 
at Taylor 
Weintraub’s 
Etsy Shop, Mad 
Patches Inc.

