I’m sure that you’ve all heard about the earthquake (and following aftershocks) that have devastated large areas in China, leaving around 34,000 dead, 29,000 missing, and almost 5 million left homeless. At times like this the design community often attempts to finds ways to help that go beyond just giving money, and the above tee is trying to do just that.It isn’t actually on sale yet, but things seem to be fairly far along so it shouldn’t be too long now. I’ll let the designer explain the design and what they’re trying to do with it:
I thought it would be cool to do something to show the true magnitude of the number of lives that have been lost, while still celebrating the uniqueness of each individual. I decided I would make a single tally mark for each of the estimated 50,000 casualties (I actually decided to do it when I still thought the number was around 12-13k, and while my investment of time is now greater - I think the significance of the project has increased as well). So the final design will feature 50,000 unique, individual marks.
50,000 lives lost
50,000 individual marks
50,000 shirts
50,000 people supporting the causeMy goal would be to sell each of the 50,000 shirts for $20 over-cost in order to raise a minimum of $1,000,000.00. Our target price is currently $24/shirt
Each shirt will be individually numbered (1 of 50,000 and so on) on the back shoulder. Shirt numbers 1 and 50,000 will be reserved for an auction to help raise even more support.
I was also thinking that we could allow for donations above and beyond the final price tag - so if I wanted to buy the shirt for $50.00, I could do so.
The final donation would be given to either the Red Cross or World Vision, or some other relief organization currently working in China.
It would be brilliant if they could reach their goal of $1 million dollars for charity, getting everything set up quickly is clearly very important, so that the events are still fresh in people’s minds.
Here’s a few relevant links:
FiftyThousandShirts.com - Main website of the project
Related Emptees Thread
Related blog post from the host store
2 Responses
Noddy
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:33 pm
1Cool concept and nice to see the tee community (you included Andy) doing their bit. I certainly plan on getting one of these.
Realistically, shifting 50,000 tees must be pretty hard unless your able to break into the zeitgeist like the Water Aid people did a few years back in the UK. Whereupon every fucking teenager in the land had a white, rubber bracelet on.
Heres hoping eh!
Andy
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:19 am
2This, literally, was the least I could do for this project, hopefully alerting a few more people will help them sell a few more tees. I’ll probably buy one, and maybe have one as a competition prize too.
Shifting 50,000 tees is a pretty tall order, its going to take a lot to achieve, but considering they’re aiming for $20 above cost as the selling point, as sales tail off they could probably half the price, sell a load more tees, and raise a lot of money for charity.
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