I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for
howies®, their tees rarely blow me away from a technical point of view, but they usually seemed to get things right and I got a good vibe from them. Yes, I said ‘vibe’, clearly 4 days in San Francisco changed me!
So, when I heard that howies were launching what is ostensibly a t-shirt design competition called teepay I rolled my eyes a little bit (more competitions?), but by the looks of things they’ve got it right again. If you know about Cameesa, then their business model will not come as a shock to you; designers upload designs, if 30 people order the tee then howies will print it onto their organic tees and post it out to you (though the FAQ states that it’s 50 orders), and the designer gets 10% of each sale, or they can choose to give their 10% to a charity of their choice. I can’t see what happens if you make an order and the tee doesn’t reach the minimum number of orders, but it’s safe to presume that you aren’t going to be paying for a tee that they don’t print.
In keeping with the charity theme, teepay are going to give 1% of their turnover or 10% of their pre-tax profits (whichever is greater) to environmentally and socially conscious charities through the ‘
1% for the Planet‘ organisation.
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and the designs do seem solid on the whole, especially the ones that have been printed, so hopefully that suggests that they’ve managed to get a good community of designers on-board early on, which should in turn attract more quality doodlers as time goes on. The ladies can expect to pay £20 for a tee, whilst the fellas will be parting with £25 to get their hands on some organic goodness.
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On the first day, the
first damn day of my trip around the west coast of America I managed to somehow break my camera after a morning wandering along Santa Monica beach (I also burned myself pretty badly/hilariously, adding insult, and injury, to mechanical injury), and it took me until Las Vegas to happen upon a Best Buy to buy a new one, and as I was going to the Grand Canyon the next day, I
needed a camera. I walked in, asked what the cheapest camera was ($129 with tax), and bought it. The camera ain’t so great, but the pictures as ‘okay-ish’ after I have some fun with them in Photoshop, as you can see on
my Flickr page.
One of the fun things about owning a bad camera is that I end up purposefully taking ‘bad’ shots just in case they turn out interesting, almost as if I have a digital Holga, which has meant that I’ve been spending more time….. wait for it…. shooting from the hip!
Yeah, it sure was a long walk for that one, huh?
Forty Sixty aren’t actually a clothing company, they’re three dudes that like to take photos, but they’re trying their hands at designing tees, and by the looks of their store, they’re not half bad at it.
Costiness=$15 (at time of writing, which was a pre-sale price) Buy it at Forty Sixty Clothing
Including The Quiet Life, Monsieur T., Mishka, DURKL, amongst others, and if you spend more than $50 your order will be shipped free of charge (presuming you live in the US, of course).
No word on when the sale ends, but as this is being described as a Spring Cleaning event then I would assume that it will run until most of the items have sold out.
When I left Philly to embark on my great journey around the West coast I resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t get to visit the new
Print Liberation store up in Northern Liberties. However, before flying home to Great Britain (emphasis on the Great), I did spend a couple more days in Philly and went out to a great Mexican place that served grilled baby octopus that tasted
exactly like chicken lo mein, and whilst we were there one of my dining companions (who is probably reading this) mentioned that the store wasn’t that far away, so we headed down after finishing our margaritas. By the way, how amazing are margaritas? It’s as if someone took lemonade, and decided it wasn’t awesome enough yet, so they put booze in it.
I’d love to tell you that the store itself.is a Johnny Cupcake-esque journey of wonder and amazement, but it’s just a normal store, with a table tennis table in it. It’s cool, don’t get me wrong, I like Print Liberation’s tees because they’re bold and simple, so it makes sense that the store sticks to the same aesthetic, but I didn’t want to build it up for you too much. In other PL-related news, they’ve started selling one-off test tees (haha, testees!) which could probably be summed up as ‘normal Print Liberation tees + a bucket of crazy + thumbprints’, they aren’t my bag, but I’m sure some of you will enjoy the mystery of buying a t-shirt that can essentially be looked upon as a ‘mistake’.
