We Took the Cheap Shirts Down

This company is eight days old. In eight days we have put up a catalog, and today we took a piece of it back down. I would rather write that here while it is still embarrassing than let it get polished into a strategy later.

One of the first things we listed was a t-shirt with our own joke across the front. It was print on demand. The way that works is that somebody orders it, a printer I have never visited prints our tree on a blank I have never held, and a box goes out from a warehouse I could not find on a map. Thirty two dollars. If you had emailed me and asked who made it, I would have had to admit that I did not know.

Nobody ever ordered one. We have not sold a single thing yet, to anybody, and that is the only reason I get to write this as a story instead of an apology. The shirts went up in the first week and came down in the second. The whole mistake stayed inside the building.

It is still a strange thing to have listed under a slogan about logging off. The entire idea here is that an object should have a person behind it. We were breaking our own rule on the one product with our joke printed across the chest.

So today every print-on-demand item came off. Seven of them. Five went dark outright: the beanie, the women's heavy knit crew, the trucker hat, the mug, the sticker. The two tees did not go dark, because we had somewhere better to put them.

Here is what replaces the shirt. The cotton is grown organically on farms in Texas. It is spun, knit and finished in North and South Carolina, all of it within a few hours of itself. It is cut and sewn by a company called Spiritex, outside Asheville, who have been doing exactly this since long before anybody needed a word for it. The colour is called natural, which is a polite way of saying nobody dyed it. No dye bath. No runoff. The colour cotton already is, which also means it will look a little different from one bolt to the next, and I have decided to like that about it.

It is forty four dollars instead of thirty two. I want to be plain about where the twelve dollars went, because slow fashion is a phrase that usually arrives with a candle and a soft filter and no arithmetic. It went to a farm that does not spray, to a spinner and a knitter paid American wages, and to a cut-and-sew floor in North Carolina instead of a fulfilment queue. Twelve dollars is roughly one lunch. The shirt outlasts a few hundred of them.

There is a kids' version now, which we never had before, on the same cotton. And a women's cut drafted for a woman rather than shrunk down from the men's, which I am told is a lower bar than the industry generally clears.

None of the three are buyable yet, and I would rather say so on the page than quietly take orders I cannot fill. The blanks are sitting in North Carolina. We are choosing the shop that prints them and trying hard to make that a Wisconsin one. When the first run lands we photograph the actual shirt rather than a picture of the idea of one, and then it goes on sale. There is a form on the tee's page if you want to hear about it the day that happens.

The hat and the beanie stay dark until there is a real one. A union cap shop in New Jersey that has been sewing since 1992 is working out what ours would cost. Two knitting factories, one in Ohio and one in Vermont, got a letter from me this morning about the beanie. The mug is with real potteries. None of it is fast.

Eight days is not long enough to have earned an opinion about much. It is long enough to notice you are already doing the thing you said you would not do. Slow fashion is not a mood. It is refusing to sell something you cannot explain. We were about to. Now we are not.