Mar 29, 2012 BUSINESS HICCUPS
Thinking about starting a t-shirt line? Well before you start you might want to read through this post from The Hundreds where they discuss one of their challenges when becoming one of the top streetwear brands in the industry today.
The initial few hundred bucks we ever scrapped together from our personal bank accounts, Ben and I put towards screenprinting our first t-shirts. We asked an acquaintance of ours to help us out; he had a small 2-color press in his backyard, so we dropped off a CD of art files and a boxful of blanks. It was 2003 and we were off to a bright future in apparel.
Or so we thought. Weeks went by. Then months. Nothing. Excuses turned into straight-to-voicemail, turned into frustration. We had lost almost an entire summer waiting for our tees, our first accounts had been promised deliveries that were weeks late, and our precious blanks were held hostage in some woodshed in the Valley.
So we showed up on our friend’s doorstep, unannounced, and demanded to see our product. One by one, he pulled each crumpled t-shirt from the floor mess. The first tee’s graphic was a little too high in placement. He shrugged, “It’s not so bad,” and picked up another. This time the print was upside down. A little flustered, he tossed it aside and grabbed the next shirt. The print was on the wrong side. “There’s always a margin of error,” he justified, “you have to expect a few fuck-ups.”
“Then how do you explain this?,” Ben asked, as he reached down and handed our friend a completely blank t-shirt. No print anywhere.
And that was that. 15 minutes later we were sitting in the car, doors flung open, staring at the roof with the sun glinting in our eyes. “Our company’s over before we even started,” we wailed in self-pity. That was everything, all our cash that had gone into the blanks — right down the drain with the ink washed from the screens.
We pulled ourselves together and somehow managed to peddle off a fraction of the t-shirts that were somewhat presentable. With that money, we faced our next dilemma. Time to find a new silkscreen printshop. to the rest of the post…