chaunt: t<3    |

The success of online tshirt vendors is being transferred to the high street, with big names in the online tee world opening up real life stores to sell to the non-online public.

Last year, Threadless opened up a store in Chicago and by all reports it seems to be going great guns.  A very innovative approach to marketing through scheduled events and regular display art has led to the store being a huge success (the display art sales alone have totalled almost $10k and sell out quickly).

Well another big name in tshirt design is opening up a second ‘real life’ store in LA, having one already situated in Boston.  Johnny Cupcakes has gone from strength to strength in recent years.  Check out the new LA store (due to open May 2008) and the change in warehousing facilities over the last five years …

“Warehouse” in 2003, his parent’s dining room:

And the new in-development warehouse, 2008:

Do you like to fuck with people’s minds?  If so then this might be the perfect tshirt site for you.

Disinformation Tshirts sell tees that at first glance look like a bog standard shirt.  Then you look again and wonder what’s going on, and then it clicks.  At least I think it would because I was obviously viewing these on the site knowing that something was wrong …

 See it says that Nixon made the quote, but it’s got a picture of Kennedy and the quote was actually made by Roosevelt.  In actual fact the shirt falls down slightly because it seems that the actual quote is “… the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.  Which isn’t quite the same, and isn’t, from what I can tell, intentional.

Anyhoos, here are another couple to play with your mind a little.  I have no idea if the image quality is really this bad or if it’s just their site … I hope the latter.

I can’t decide whether this tee by designbyhumans is the ugliest thing I ever saw, or whether it is in fact pretty cool.

So what do you reckon?

Likewise this design by Threadless.

I am leaning towards ugly for both.  Yup, definitely ugly.

Karl over on his blog, tcritic.com, made a very interesting post recently showcasing various tshirt/fashion related Facebook applications.

Now I’m not a  big Facebooker, but I didn’t realise that ONE such application existed, nevermind a dozen or more.  Now some of them are fairly cool (Threadless Plus) wherease others are just, well, almost meaningless.

In terms of users, My Label has by far the most (241 daily active users).

Anyway, head over to tcritic to read the whole post.

You know, the lack of grammar and spelling used online is beginning to grate on me.  I don’t know if people are genuinely stupid or just lazy, but either way it reflects badly on you.

I was just browsing through the submissions on Threadless, when I saw this tee:

My first reaction to this tee was “wow, I fucking love it - $5″ (the $ indicates the “I would buy it option”, the 5 the score out of 5).  Then I saw it.  “Your Fired”.  What the fuck?  Your fired what?

At this point I got slightly mad and just wanted to punch something.  Why would you be so, so stupid (or lazy) and invalidate your entry when it was such a fantastic design otherwise?

Threadless today announced a few changes/improvements to their offering.

1. They are now printing new tees exclusively on Threadless brand tees.  If you’re not a Threadless follower/fan, you might say “so what?”.  Well until now, Threadless has printed its tees on Fruit of the Loom and American Apparel shirts.  I can testify to the fact that the quality of these is variable and the sizes vary considerably.  The new Threadless tees are, apparently (I haven’t got one yet), much better quality and of course much more consistent.  So that’s good news #1.
2. Good news #2 is that they have added sizes.  You can now get XS girls, XS guys, 3XL guys and 2XL girls!  So really there is very little chance you won’t find a tee to fit you here.  Be warned that if you’ve bought before, the sizes might vary from the old shirts.  One example given states that a girly medium for example is now about a girly large.
3. Thirdly is that the new tee brand means that interesting new colours will be coming along.  I for one was getting somewhat tired of every other tee being on a grey tee.
4. And lastly, something that might or might not be viewed as an improvement (which is why I referred to ‘changes’ earlier).  Variable pricing.  That means that rather than every guy’s tee being $15, girl’s tees being $17 (I never understood the price difference really) and Selects $25, each tee will be priced according to its printing and decoration techniques (ie what inks and materials are used).  That means that a tee might be anything from $15 to $26 (maybe more, but that’s the priciest and cheapest on offer right now).

So what does this mean in real terms?  Well in a way, Threadless has grown up.  Design by Humans has been pulling away in the quality of their prints and tees and Threadless needed to act.  With the recent opening of it’s retail store in Chicago and the gradual introduction of its Threadless bran tees (until now limited to Select), Threadless has been evolving.  It can now compete not only in terms if range and design quality (it still attracts the best tee designers, in my opinion), but in quality and value for money too.  Which I believe it still is, despite this ‘cloaked’ price increase (granted it didn’t fool many, but it still wasn’t billed as an increase).

So I was planning a comprehensive review of Threadless, but now I must put that on hold until I’ve had a few Threadless brand tees with the new inks and materials.  I’m gladI didn’t start it yet!

In the meantime, here’s a very cool tee that was released today (though slightly ‘geeky’).

Well, female gingers at least, in my humble opinion.  All ginger kids tend to be ugly, both male and female.  But whereas ginger males grow into, usually, ugly ginger males - ginger girls tend to turn into hot ginger women.  I could give many examples, but then again I can’t think of many ginger grown women that are ugly - can you?

That said, there is a lot of anti-ginger feeling out there in the world.  My long time friend said that if she ever had a ginger kid she would have to give it up for adoption!  Here are a few ginger related tshirts I could find, both pro and anti-.

The first is from Chargrilled and one I could wear - if it were changed to “The Ginger Women Appreciation Society”.

And here’s another one for gingers to wear, a nice take on the Orange logo from The Wildhearts’ band store .

Now to the more anti-ginger tees.  Here’s one from Palmers Cash:

And finally, a quite amusing tee even if it is anti-ginger, again from Chargrilled:

 And finally, to balance things out to the positive again, here is a website dedicated to gingers which sells a variety of garments under the “red and proud” banner: http://www.redandproud.com

There are a few awesome tshirt sites out there who have fantastic designs … but their sites aren’t in English.  It’s such a shame because it wouldn’t be soooo hard for them to have an English option and ship internationally (actually they might but I don’t know because I can’t understand the damn site!).

First is Maryjane , a Russian site based on submissions and voting much like DBH and Threadless.  Here are a couple of awesome shirts I would love to order:

Then there’s Camiseteria, a Brazilian site in the same vain.  Oh how I’d love to get my hands on their catalogue!

Oh, and they have some hot models too (not that that would sway me …).

This one from Camiseteria was so familiar, I killed myself searching for it’s doppleganger - I thought it was a design on Threadless.  And then my other half said “It looks like Ah Munna Eat Choo!” (she’s a Threadless fan also).  And that was it, that’s what it reminded me of.  I think (if it really does exist elsewhere, let me know!).

As posted on the Johnny Cupcakes blog:

Frightening Fridge, Uneasy Bake Oven, and Big Bad Blender.

Colorful, bold, fun and scary. Spooky styles inspired from the old Ghostbuster cartoons. Remember those toys that came out? There was a toilet, and when you opened the lid it turned into a vicious ghoul? Or the old lady Ghostbusters toy, and if you pulled her hat up her entire jaw would drop to her feet, revealing these intense sharp teeth. Enjoy!

It’s funny because Ghostbusters didn’t spring to mind at all, but now I have read that it makes them even more appealing somehow.  Bit pricey at $35 a pop or $105 for the set, plus shipping … but tempting, oh so tempting.

By the way, Johnny has a cool site and an even cooler story behind the brand.

Spotted these at taddict and couldn’t resist posting them too.

After starting this site, I am coming across more and more cool tshirt vendors.  www.oddica.com is one such site and has some very cool tees on offer.

I love this shirt (called Moops vs Wolf if you were wondering where the post title came from), which is $20 (or two tees for $34, $16 each for three or more) and also comes as a hoodie for $40.