Wednesday, January 7, 2009

This is the second tee that I’ve received from Squishi, I liked the first one, and you know what? I rather like this one too. For the uninitiated, Squishi are a new-ish tee company from Southern (boo!) England (yay!) that get some totally awesome artists such as Drew Millward and Luke Drozd (who designed this tee), print them up on American Apparel tees, and sell them, yeah, I know, a new tee company that doesn’t do crowdsourcing or run a design competition, madness!

I think that Squishi and I are pretty well-aligned when it comes to artistic tastes, because there are no designs in their growing catalogue that I don’t like. Actually, that’s a bit of a lie, I don’t really like this one, but seriously, what the hell is that pink thing?

Squishi appear to like designs with a lot of elements, lots going on and a fair amount of detail too. It’s a little bit odd that this tee is called ‘Monkey King,’ I’m not questioning the importance of the simian, that monkey is clearly in charge, but my issue is that the Monkey is pretty much the last thing I noticed about tee, with all the other elements there is a definite lack of focus on the monkey. That’s not really an issue when you look at it, you see what you see, but when you know the name something about it seems a bit off. Perhaps I’m just focusing too much on the stuff going about the elephant and monkey because those are my favourite parts.

Squishi print all their shirts themselves from their Wiltshire-based HQ/garage, and I really like that, aside from the fact it is apparently troublesome to find a UK based printer that can do a good job (from what I’ve heard), it means that Squishi are very involved with their own product. Justifiably, they can be proud of what they produce, and as if to prove that they know what they’re doing, they’ve even blogged the whole printing process, which is interesting to a guy like me, though probably slightly less interesting to Joe the t-shirt buyer who just wants to get their cool tee and be done with it. Printing quality is impressive, and I know it lasts because the last one I got is still going strong. The tee felt a bit short on me compared to normal, and they mention in the notes that it is fairtrade, which makes me question whether it’s made by American Apparel like their other shirts. Do AA do fairtrade tees? It wasn’t a poor fit by any stretch of the imagination, I just thought it warranted mentioning.

Costiness=£15 Buy Monkey King at Squishi

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