T-shirts without tags - Is there such a thing?

A common request I get is for t-shirts without tags. Although I sell several styles of shirts that have tear-away tags, removable labels inside the collar, some of the shirts on the market that are called "tagless" in fact have tags that are laminated inside the collar. These transfer printed tags in the collar cannot be removed and although they are tagless there is no way to get rid of the company name that identifies the garment. I am very sorry, but when I get request for shirts with absolutely no tags, I have taken to asking the potential customer, "How will you know what you have?" Most customers haven't considered this problem, but today I had a customer respond with, "I'll just compare them to each other and figure out what size they are". Good idea if you want to waste all your time sorting shirts. I do sympathize with the customer in this situation because even tags that are removable they require some work and effort to cleanly remove the label. Any label can be cut out of a shirt, but yes, there is going to be some remnant of the tag in the shirt. Unless you have a seamstress that is willing to cut the threads inside the collar cleanly this would be way more trouble than it is worth. My opinion is that you just have to be crafty in this situation and it is nearly impossible to imitate a large company product effect by removing and sewing in your own labels. May people cut or remove the tags and then print inside the collar the size and the name they want to represent. This works, but it is the same work and cost of doing a one-color print on the front or back of a shirt. Economically this doesn't seem like a good idea, but for style reasons some people will spend the money to do this. Keep in mind you have to have a layout for each size of the shirts you are printing, so you need a design for the small, medium, large, xlarge...

Y-Que adds Bandito image and redesigns Ekay t-shirt design interface

This new image is an example of the simple printing that Y-Que does, but if you go to Ekay.com you can see the modified t-shirt design interface and see how this design looks on a wide range of t-shirt colors.

Gildan buys Anvil - How does this affect you?

Gildan buys Anvil for approximately 90 million. Sounds like chump change for a major brand, but what do I know. Things may have been tougher for Anvil than we realized. Although I like and promote many of their shirts, I didn't think they were a takeover target. If anything I considered Anvil to be a bit of an upstart with innovative lines attempting to do for t-shirts what American Apparel has done for marketing. The construction is always missing something with Anvil, but the same can be said for Gildan t-shirts. I sell more Gildan t-shirts than I do Anvil, but that is mostly a price issue. I just hope that some of the new lines of organic t-shirts are not discontinued. Also, I am hopeful that the new USA made Anvil shirt gets off the ground with more production so there can be more inventory in the pipeline. Better Gildan did this than anyone else.

The new T-shirt Swatch Catalogs are here - Yipeee!

I now have the complete selection of color swatches for the following brands of t-shirts: Anvil, Hanes, Gildan, Fruit of the Loom, Bella Canvas, Jerzee and my new favorite Next Level Apparel. I will be posting these colors with references and links to allow a broader selection and choice for t-shirt colors from these brands. Colors are everything when it comes to t-shirts, even with Organic t-shirts the colors are getting better. Anvil is attempting to be a leader in Organic t-shirts and let's hope they pull it off because it has not been easy getting exactly what people want when it comes to an environmentally sensitive garment. Next up, Swatches, everyone.

It's a dirty job, but my son has got to do it...

My son has been working on Flash web design interfaces for simple games over the last few years. He's gotten a pirate ship to shoot canons and lines that do something or another. However, lately he's been focused on making a web design interface to allow me to show images on t-shirts similar to my barbaric version shown here at Ekay.com and here at: free-speech.com/City1

The basic concept seems simple, but I can tell he has advanced himself in his knowledge of scripting because he no longer acts like it is easy and marvels at getting some of the seemingly simple task to work properly. I think the biggest challenge is to tie any interface back in to a shopping cart, but we won't bother to go there for now as this is just fun and games.

Selling t-shirts online in the summer is like selling corn from a truck

Who isn't familiar with trucks selling corn on the side of the road in the middle of summer, or some other vegetable. Corn is what comes to mind right away, but it could be strawberries or peaches, whatever the surplus vegetable is in your area. Running a website online with t-shirts for sale in the middle of summer is sort of like that only without the stinky exhaust of trucks in your face. We sit here and wait for orders with pictures of shirts hanging over the side of the website. People drive by and look sneeringly at our products, but eventually they will be hungry and realize that we have the cheapest shirts, widest variety and heck they need t-shirts, so they buy some.

The counter-intuitive aspect of all of this is that thousands of other people also need t-shirts in the summer, so the best products are often out of stock as the summer wears on. So order weeks in advance of your event if you need something different or a wide variety of t-shirts and colors, because it may not be available at the click of a button in the middle of July.

T-shirts ARE forever

and ever. How many years will a t-shirt design stay around in the closet or drawer? Eventually a t-shirt may end up in Africa or in a thrift store. They inevitably come back as vintage clothing, so statistically speaking the t-shirt you wear today may still have a couple of lives left in it. T-shirts are forever.