If you read Hide Your Arms you probably know who Coty Gonzales is. If not, he’s another tee blogger, a good one, who has been writing about shirts (and more) for the past couple of years, and is quite a lot more comfortable in videos than I am. I think I’ve mentioned in the past that I’dlike to get into doing more interviews on HYA, and I thought that Coty would be interesting since us tee bloggers are usually pretty sociable but people don’t really know much about us because you don’t really need much of a backstory to be a tee blogger, you just have to like t-shirts. I can’t lie, this isn’t a short interview, it’s 13 questions, but I get bored of reading the same questions and answers on other blogs, so I’ve tried to change things up a bit so I asked Coty questions that focused on him and what he does rather than general questions I could ask to anyone in the street. Coty is a damn good blogger, so if you’re a tee blogger wondering why you aren’t getting the traffic you want I suggest that you give this a read and learn from it.
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I said on Tuesday that I was going to run an interview with
The Hipstery ‘later this week’ and bam, midnight on Friday, here’s an interview with Willem Von Tinkel, it’s like I’m a professional or something!
How did you come up with the idea for the site?
Well the year was 1922 and the summer long and endless. I was taking a voyage on the HMS Belfrey to the Newfoundland. After a night of heavy liquid intoxication I entered a poker game with a burly mustached Russian, terribly nice chap, political views aside. A few hands and a mistimed pre-flop ‘all in’ later, I’d squandered the family fortune. Destitute and facing a life time of shunnage I jumped overboard. Luckily I slipped and fell to the deck below where I promptly fell unconscious. Good times.
It’s a pretty strange idea though, do you really think anyone will pay 16eur for a t-shirt they’ve not seen?
Well the psychology of mystery is pretty well documented, from Kinder Eggs to Blind Dates, to Lost. So that part we’ll pass quickly over. There’s another thing we like to call it the opposability factor. The more one approach becomes standard and idealized the more opportunity there is for a few people to do the complete opposite and attract people disillusioned by that standard. We’re the counterpart to an endless striving for more choice, more options, more control. While other sites might offer 147 ways to skin a cat, we offer you one, our way.
Plus our shirts are pretty epic.
Where do the shirts come from?
Simply from the best T-Shirt stores out there. Since our team has been in this business some time now designing, discussing, selling and wearing a lot of T-shirts we have quite a standard and fair impression what makes an extraordinary “Tee”. Usually, our T-Shirts aren’t available at the original source anymore. We would never sell a shirt we would not be proud to wear ourselves.
Are you not just piggybacking on the hardwork of other t-shirt brands?
Preposterous. We got into this to help promote those brands, the brands we cherish. Every shirt we sell is accompanied with the logo and a paragraph of text about the site it originates from, we want to promote great art. We will add more great T-shirt stores, anyone interested should get in touch with us if they’re looking to spread their word and their shirts in Europe.
Who do you see as your target customers?
That is tricky. It’s probably not the average cotton enthusiast that reads Hide Your Arms, you guys are fanatical about shirts and know where to find great ones already. I’d suspect our audience wants the joy of discovery without too much work in the process of that discovering. Or they just want an unusual experience and something novel. Hipstery shirts are also great gifts, with the pressure for picking something the receiver will love falls on our broad shoulders, not yours.
What if I don’t like the shirt I get?
We are true believers in our tastes and technology – I am confident the algorithm our team developed works just perfectly. If, however, you don’t like what you get, you can you can invoke our 2000% satisfaction guarantee, which basically makes you twenty times as happy as a 100% guarantee, possibly maths is not a strongpoint of mine.
Who is behind the site?
We’ve laid our souls bare on the Meet the Team page. Not even our parole officers know that much about us. It is a mystery we keep. Not even all of the team know who is on the team, that’s how secretive we are.
And now you know! The Hipstery team have also been kind enough to provide us with a coupon code that will last for the next seven days and give you 25% off your order (saving you €4 per tee), that coupon code is hideyourpalms.
I’m going to be straight up with you, I have no idea who Alvaro Ilizarbe is, and when I got an e-mail from Fabulous Nobodies (FABNOB, who I also hadn’t encountered before, though they count me as a friend in their sidebar, so they must be good people) asking if it was ‘worthy of a mention on HYA’ I figured it wouldn’t be, because why would I point you towards an interview with someone I’d never heard of? But I was putting the cart before the horse, and I
actually enjoyed the interview, and finding out about Alvaro’s clothing line,
Freegums.
FABNOB, who apart from having a name that makes us Brits titter, seem to be trying to bring good non-Aussie brands to Australians, kind of like
Electric Press are doing in the UK. At the moment they’ve got Dance Party Massacre,
Seibei, Glamour Kills, Imaginary Foundation and
Local Celebrity on their roster, amongst others, so if you’re Australian and sick of paying exorbitant shipping fees when buying from non-native brands, FABNOB would probably be worth a look.
