PHOENIX (CBS5) -
In just three short years of designing eye-catching T-shirts, the Arizona woman behind the "Cha-Cha ChiC" line is getting the break of a lifetime.
T-shirts designed by Valley entrepreneur Cathy Garcia, of Glendale, will be inside the swag bags given out to Sunday night's Grammy Award celebrities.
Garcia calls them "tees," but they're anything but basic.
"(They're) very colorful, fun, Latin-inspired, but they are designed for everyone to wear," Garcia said.
Everyone who is anyone in the music industry will now have one of their own. She said celebrities like Bruno Mars, Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gag, Diana Ross and Lionel Ritchie will own them.
Three of Garcia's "Cha-Cha ChiC" designer T-shirts went inside the Grammy award celebrity swag bags.
Garcia said that getting the invitation is like winning a Grammy of her own - a "pinch me moment" that still leaves her a bit speechless.
"Wow, that's all I could say," Garcia said. "Wow, OK."
She's come a long way in a short amount of time. After years of taking care of her Glendale family, a simple conversation with her granddaughter got her wondering what she could do for herself.
"She just said, 'Nana, you're creative. Create,'" Garcia recalled.
Garcia said the idea of a T-shirt just popped into her head.
"It's a little piece of clothes," Garcia said. "It's a little thing. I can put it on. I'm not going to invest a lot of time and money. And let me start there."
She blended it with her passion for fashion and flair and came up with a unique set of T-shirts that she believes inspire you to move.
"The colors, the feeling when you're wearing them," she said. "I just feel when you're wearing them you just have that cha-cha feeling."
Garcia said her designs come from the heart, like childhood memories and moments.
"I had a folder saved and had all these pictures like paper dolls and all these cut outs," Garcia said. "I had a menu with a guitar on it. My uncle played the guitar. I saved these for all these things and that's how I came up with the guitar."
She's come this far after first catching the eye of the Latin Grammy Awards a few years ago. Then, Latina Magazine. Now, she's caught the eye of her biggest audience yet.
"I just had the dream," Garcia said. "The sketch pad and here I am."
The Cha-Cha-ChiC line is named after her pet Chihuahua.
Garcia said it's overwhelming to think her designs will be in the hands of the some of music's biggest names.
Which begged the question, what's she going to wear?
"That I don't know yet," Garcia said before Grammy day. "I haven't had time to design something for myself."
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Cathy Garcia
Cathy Garcia (middle) at the Grammy's
Cha-Cha-ChiC office
Garcia's eye-catching T-shirt designs
