Article on Tshirts in today's NYTimes...

[triniboy27]

Enjoy:

Keeping T-Shirts in the Moment

By GUY TREBAY

NEVER underestimate the power of a martini when drafting a business plan. This point may not be taught at the Wharton School, but it is probably worth keeping in mind. It was over a boozy discussion of guy trouble three years ago that Kristin Bauer and Liz Vassey had the light-bulb moment that led them to found JustDumped.com, a company that makes T-shirts with slogans that read like semaphores flared from the battleground of contemporary romance.

"It seemed so unfair that you had to hang around with someone for six months before you found out what their issues were," Ms. Bauer said by telephone from the annex of the house in Burbank, Calif., where she runs her business. "Why not put it all out front?"

Why not? The first shirts produced by the two women, who both work regularly as actresses, bore the tag lines, "Wasn't picked for Cheerleading," "Ignore Me and I'm Yours" and "Emotionally Unavailable Men Rock." If the messages were a little heavy on the ironic masochism, the result of the women's impromptu foray into business was surprisingly empowering.

"We had six of each phrase printed up for $15 a shirt, which is an outrageous price I found out later," Ms. Bauer said. "And I wore one to all the press stuff for a show I was doing for NBC called 'Hidden Hills.' "

The sitcom was eventually pulled, but the shirts caught on when a TV Guide reporter wrote an item about Ms. Bauer's new company, so loosely organized at the time that it lacked a dedicated phone line. "After TV Guide came out, we got a call that 'Extra!' wanted to do a story. We had 60 shirts we were giving to a few friends and a Web site that didn't work. So we went out to dinner, were drinking martinis again, came back and logged on and there were 500 orders," Ms. Bauer said. "We decided, 'O.K., I guess we get some boxes and figure this thing out.' "

Without realizing it, the two women had accidentally stumbled into the slipstream of a pop cultural trend.

Lately limited edition T-shirts, most likely made in someone's cellar in Brooklyn, have suddenly become the hipster's preferred mode of expression. Whether produced by college pals with studio art degrees or sold by highly organized Web companies like threadless.com - visitors to the site offer ideas and vote on designs, which are then put into microproduction - the limited edition T-shirt has become impossible to avoid.

Often crude and uncommercial-looking, its imagery represents a kind of generational response to the bland uniformity of the mass-marketed "vintage" lines found in every mall. This development has not been lost on those same manufacturers, however. Some are already producing T-shirts that mimic the do it yourself look of indie T-shirts. "T-shirts are a really cheap blank slate," said Ariel Foxman, the editor of Cargo, Condé Nast's shopping magazine for men. "People have found a relatively inexpensive way to distinguish themselves."

The trend partly reflects the great democratic welter of the e-commerce ether, and it partly serves as a marker of hipness, defined by the savvy with which a consumer can navigate the Web labyrinth in search of the coolest obscurities. For a snapshot of the estimated 1,500 sites now selling limited edition T-shirts, one might double click on Wowch.com, whose designs ring changes on the visual conventions of painting-on-velvet kitsch, or to Trainwreck Industries, a 10,000-shirts-a-year site run by a San Francisco designer, Alec Patience, whose motifs run to sight gags like Mao as a D.J., or Che Guevara's face morphed into that of Ace Frehley, the lead guitarist of the rock band Kiss.

For that matter, one might even check out Prada's recent foray into the arena, a collaboration with the Chilean graffiti artist Flavien Demarigny, also known as Mambo. His shirt, the first in a series of proposed limited edition T-shirts grouped under the highfalutin' title "Unspoken Dialogues," has a drawing of a figure and a boom box that could politel

[wild_whiskey]

Funny. I happen to be wearing a shirt right now that I printed myself.

[andewhall]

"Limited edition" seems so wide spread now days.

Heres a new plan of T-shirt selling. Release an ace T-shirt.........hype it up.......don't advertise it's Limited edition.......start to sell loads........then drop it.

It's the donkey and carrot method, haha. Then you get loads of cats thinking, wish I had got one of those T's.

[darknworn]

limited edition is the new buzzword. corporate marketing machine at work. it's only sustainable because there's a new sucker born every minute.

"God is Dead" - Neitzsche

"Neitzsche is Dead" - God

[Kane]

Personally, I like what the guys over at threadless.com are doing.

It's moot now, but I had something along the same idea about 5-6 years ago, but didn't do anything about it.

[CactusArmy]

thanks for the article