A number of US sites have taken to producing charity t-shirts to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. Thisismyblog has an excellent round up of the stores offering apparel. I repeat their list here:
1.) Threadless - Regrowth: Katrina. Request a reprint if you want one. Threadless will contribute $20 to the Red Cross, for each $10 t-shirt.
2.) RopeADope - Renew Orleans. All Profits will go directly to the Preservation Hall Hurricane Relief Fund. Cost: $20 or $30 depending on which style.
3.) Mule Design (The Feed Store) - Please Help New Orleans. All profits from this shirt will be donated to the Red Cross. $25
If you want to donate money please go to the American Red Cross site.
Stocks of
Hugh’s limited edition t-shirts are running pretty low, with some sizes now completely sold out. It’s strictly first-come, first-served:
Each gapingvoid t-shirt is from a limited edition of 200. One design, 200 shirts. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. I won’t be reprinting the design.
Once an edition sells out, it is replaced with another. But no more than 4 designs will ever be made available at one time. So no more than 800 shirts available, ever.
Take a look, get in quick, and then when they have gone we can release a new design.
Whilst we are a big fan of John Lewis’s website, we need to remind fat-fingered callers that we are not John Lewis, Oxford Street but in fact Indigo Clothing. Their number is 0207 629 7711, our number is 0207 329 7711.
Now I have got that off my chest I feel better already 
Published by Alex 2 years, 7 months ago
in News.
Indigo only offers about 300 different products in our online product catalogue. We in fact can supply literally thousands of styles but we believe there is such a thing as too much choice when it comes to promotional catalogues. For example, we can get nearly 200 different t-shirt types or brands from our wholesalers but we pick out the best ones for our core web catalogue.
Nonetheless, we understand that sometimes people are after a specific brand or colour, or simply want to browse a bigger range. This is why we have teamed up with our wholesaler to offer a supplemental catalogue which lists a much broader array of items. It unfortunately does not have pricing in it but rest assured that everything in it is as aggressively priced as the items in the core catalogue. If there is anything in it that takes your fancy just give us a call (0871 711 2151 (UK)) or email us (info@indigoclothing.com) and we can get you a custom quote.
Everyone’s favorite cricket fan and client services team member, Richard “Dickie” Heathcote, will be leaving Indigo today and heading up to Newcastle University to continue with this studies in Marine Biology. His days of stomping around the office, novelty light-sabers in hand, will be sorely missed. We wish him luck with his studies and hope to see his face around the office (hopefully with tongue in) soon!
Luxist, a blog for Fashion products, suggests that American Apparel, the US based, ethically orientated, promotional clothing manufacturer, could be the new Gap on the High Street. They do now have a store on trendy Carnaby Street in Soho, London, but nevertheless this is quite a bold claim. Their marketing has become notably sexier, certainly a different approach to the ‘prepy’ models that The Gap has traditionally used.
We watch the rise of American Apparel with interest but currently have not included their products in our core catalogue. Maybe we should? Certainly their dog t-shirts and Sutainable Edition are interesting:
Gigi Swanson over at Music Business Marketing has written a great article about the role t-shirts play in useful merchandise for touring bands:
As an artist/performer you are selling an experience and fans will buy a souvenir of that experience in the form of a CD, clothing, buttons, posters, etc. As music fans we have all come home with something more tangible than a ticket stub and it’s usually something we can wear….
You can package CDs with a T Âshirt for an “added value” sales incentive such as offering them “half off” with a CD purchase. You can use them as door prizes or as a thank you for the sound guy or the waitress at the clubs you play. The same applies for coffeehouse, church and house concert gigs. Even when you play for free you can earn money and build goodwill and name recognition….
I prefer 100% cotton heavyweight Tees in the 6.0 oz range for long term durability. Brands such as Gildan, Hanes, and Jerzees have been common favorites for years. Heavier fabric is knitted tighter which enables a better screen print, especially when using detail and four color process. Plus they are typically cut larger and hold up better with multiple washings. But you must think of the tastes of the end user and the image you are trying to promote. That’s where fashion often comes in. Knowing your audience is key…
Indigo are starting to look beyond the shores of the Britain for partnerships with foreign promotional clothing companies whose standards, principles, quality and pricing are inline with our ours. We get a lot of non-UK vistors to the site and we would love to be able to service our foreign vistors.
The blogosphere is a wonderful hunting ground for testimonials and company reviews. Google’s new blog search tool is handy, along with the the more established engines of Technorati and Ice Rocket. For example, I came across a wonderful post about Swiss t-shirt printers recommending a company called Kami Textildruck. These kind of reviews are solid gold in my opinion, far more helpful than reading dull ‘About Us’ pages or trying to squeeze information out of trade organisations.
We are currently very intrested in talking to American and French t-shirt printing companies, who can also offer embroidery services. Any recommendations gratefully recieved.
An artist named Amanda Appleby came to Indigo Clothing with a t-shirt printing request. She wondered if we could take some artwork she had produced and turn it into a screen-printed t-shirt. “Fine”, we said, “we do this everyday”. However, we shocked when a beautiful print of four SAS soldiers arrived at the office the next day. We normally expect artwork to arrive in electronic format rather than in a bubble-wrapped crate!
Dickie, a fully paid up member of the National Rifle Association, thought someone had sent him an early Christmas present and was crestfallen once he found out that instead of being a gift from his godfather, it was from a client, and had to be returned.
Our first challenge was to get the print into an electronic format that would be suitable for ’separation’. After a found call to our friends at Kingswood-Steele, a high-tech, digital printer near Liverpool Street, Dickie set off to deliver the print so it could be scanned with an industrial size flatbed scanner. Watching Dickie wander off with the print under his arm and a wide grin on his face, I did for one minute wonder if we or Amanda would ever see it again, but sure enough, a few hours later, Dickie, the print and a DVD-R containing the scanned artwork was safely back in Bucklersbury House.
The disc then was sent to a specialist separation house that produces films for a screen printer to use. Artwork separation is a very skilled process and can cost anywhere up to £300 for very complex, multi-colour designs. Indigo outsource separation, as you can’t beat the experience that specialist brings to the job and the ultimate quality of the t-shirt very much depends on the skill of the separator.
Amanda will be getting her t-shirts today. I hope she likes them as much as we liked the challenge of producing them for her. Amanda doesn’t have anymore of these prints left, before anyone asks, but she can be contacted on +44 (0)7788548167 should anyone want to discuss her work with her. Amanda is also a regular on eBay and her items can be found at: http://indigo.url123.com/appleby-ebay.
Work stopped for 15 minutes today as the whole office stepped outside to wave at the victorious England cricket team on their London open-top bus victory parade.
Lisa took some great parade photos. Well done England!
