I am not going to add to the millions of words that have been wasted on this subject already and simply want to wish everyone a lovely bank holiday weekend!

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Our favourite French t-shirt store, LaFraise, is selling eco-friendly, organic cotton apparel for the first time. Also, free shipping with promo code: ORGANIC.

In case you didn’t already know, Indigo Clothing offer a wide range of organic and ethical clothing which can be customsied with your logo.

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Tom, Indigo-2’s new lead web developer, has noticed, thanks to the 37signals blog, that you can have fun with the CNN headline t-shirt maker thingy we posted about yesterday!

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CNN Headlines printed on t-shirts on-demand [via tCritic/twitter: karllong]

London bike shop Velorution have Bagaboo messenger bags (photos on Flickr) - designed by messengers, very tough, great colours, in stock from £100 [via Velorution/twitter: _velorution]

Also, via traditional email this time, Howies are offering free t-shirts to customers who spend over £100 at their Carnaby St, London store. Sounds like a cunning way of dumping dead stock - I like it

P.S. Not sure what Twitter is? Common Craft have a great ‘paper’ tutorial for twitter.

P.P.S. Follow us at http://twitter.com/indigo

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Trying to steer to the political aspect of the site (if that is possible), number 86 on the list is t-shirts, and in particular vintage tees. I quote:

The most prized t-shirt category is vintage. As shown earlier, white people need authenticity like they need oxygen and to have an original vintage t-shirt from the 1970s or 1980s is a very powerful social status symbol. The ideal shirt will have a funny logo, a year attached to it, and will be as thin as rice paper. In the event that two white people have shirts that meet this criteria, the superior ranking is given to the person who paid the least for the shirt.

It is certainly worth checking this site out just to see whether all the media hype is fuss over nothing and whether this guy is actually amusing or just a writer getting amazing PR by being purposefully controversial?

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Vintage t-shirts are still fasionable and as usual Scott Hansen’s newsletter sparked my curiousity, his designs for both t-shirts and posters are so distinctive. This 1976 tee is available in 3 retro designs, printed on the American Apparel Heather Grey Tri-blend; just $23.

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The forthcoming visit to Hong Kong, a city famed for being full of skyscrapers and affordable tailors, lead me to the Internet to see if I could find any good recommendations as I wasn’t keen on leaving myself to the mercy of the Lonely Planet or a street vendor with a good tip. In the end I came up with the name of Mr. Edward Tam, of E. Italian tailors, as a result of an excellent three part post by blogger Simon Compton.

He was a little tricky to find but remarkably he was only 100m from our hotel in Kowloon, which made going for fittings a piece of cake. By the end of the weekend Mr. Tam produced two suits and 6 tailored shirts (not all for me mind you) and my friend and I, who have bought tailored items before in Chile of all places, were delighted with the results, the quality of the work and the speed in which they were produced.

Hong Kong is a great city, but in you are in the market for an excellent suit, look no further than:

Edward Tam
E. Italian
Shop 117 1F,
Regal Kowloon Hotel
71 Moody Road
Tsimshatsui East,
Kowloon, Hong Kong
Tel (852) 2367 2782

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A new four episode series is starting on BBC THREE where six young fashion lovers swap shopping for the factories and backstreet workshops of India to make clothes for the British High Street. From the press release:

The six start at the top, working for Shahi Enterprises in New Dehli, a multi-million pound factory that makes clothes for some of the biggest names on the UK High Street. They learn to sew before joining the production lines where every worker has targets to meet: for example, collars have to be sewn on to shirts at the rate of one a minute.

As unskilled workers they’re paid around £1.50 a day, a basic living wage in India. The group finds that it doesn’t stretch far – when they go to buy deodorant, it costs a day’s wages.

An accompanying online fashion magazine – Thread (bbc.co.uk/thread) – will offer tips on how to achieve an eco-glam look through a mix of shopping for new or vintage clothes, to swapping clothes with friends and customising existing clothes. The website will launch closer to the date of the first episode.

Tuesday 22 April 2008
9.00-10.00pm BBC THREE
BBC Press Release in full

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Trying to get a card to access one of the many reading rooms seemed harder than renewing my UK passport, so if you are tempted to use the facility make sure you have all the ID they demand, before they begin the lengthy process of taking a digital photo and checking your reading list. Then, even if you cross your fingers, join the cloakroom queue to hand in your bag and pens (only pencils allowed!), you’ll be told there are in fact no seats left in the reading room and books take over an hour to be fetched from the basement. Next time I go, I am going to arrive early and better prepared!

The BL has an excellent Business and IP Centre which is well worth using too and in the past Indigo has helped members of this department with their research. Last year we also produced t-shirts for one of their excellent exhibitions, Sacred; so it is worth visiting even if you are not going to seek a book or publication.

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According to the Guardian newspaper:

American Apparel claimed “the image of Allen dressed as a Hassidic character alongside Yiddish text was meant strictly as a social parody”. It added that the company sometimes used billboards “for non-commercial social and political commentary.”

Indigo Clothing offer the full range of American Apparel items and t-shirts including their organic cotton collection, which can be customised with your logo or design.

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There is a group of people out there who share the collective aim of developing the ‘perfect t-shirt‘. They have now developed a great looking website (luxuryredefined.co.uk) and, being t-shirt related, it sits in my bookmarks in the t-shirt websites category (it is a BIG category!). I do though find it’s presence there a slight irritant and hence the reason for this post. I have to get these feelings of my chest, to explain why that simple link always catches my eye and gnaws at me.

The aim of Better Thinking, the company behind the project, as I understand it, is to develop a t-shirt that is great to wear and is environmentally/socially responsible too. The project started in October 2005 and the t-shirt will be available online and from John Smedley stockists from Spring 2008 in men’s, women’s and children’s versions.

To quote from the press release (PDF):

The Luxury Redefined t-shirt is made in Derbyshire from organic, undyed, unbleached, fair trade, extra-long staple Peruvian cotton with an exceptionally low water footprint. Attention has also been paid to minimising waste, energy and packaging.

Clearly this t-shirt is being pitched at the retail market, rather than the promotional one that Indigo Clothing resides in, and looking at the prices of some of the other John Smedley t-shirts, I don’t expect this to be cheap range! All very commendable and maybe it is too early to comment having yet to see the t-shirt and the price list but I have an issue with yet another company peddling this ’story’ for some of the reasons outlined below:

Are already too many t-shirt manufacturers?

Those of you who are in the promotional clothing industry, I am sure your have bookshelves, drawers and tables full of t-shirt manufacturer catalogues. In fact, I think I think some have escaped the office and invaded my home. They breed like mice! Most of the major UK wholesalers devote a good twenty to thirty pages of their catalogues to t-shirt manufacturers. You have crew-neck, v-neck, slim-cut, 5XL, distressed, vintage, organic, fitted, boat-neck, scoop-neck, beauty-neck; you have t-shirts for dogs, women, children, babies and I am sure if I look hard enough I’ll find a chinchilla t-shirt in there somewhere too. There are American manufacturers, Turkish, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Portuguese, Eastern European, and even British. These companies range from multinational to the humble one-man-band. This does beg the question of whether there is a need for another brand and, moreover, yet another with a ‘green’ angle.

Jumped the shark?

It is so painfully fashionable to set up as an independent organic t-shirt company/brand these days that it is probably passé. I have been an avid follower of trends in the organic cotton arena and have also had strong ethical and socially responsible ideals when it has come to selecting brands to feature on our own site. It has been great to see the introduction of a variety of different kinds of ethical products such as Continental Clothing’s Earth Positive collection in the promo sector, and Nike’s and M&S’s (to name but two) in the retail sphere. Nonetheless, I have also have been critical of the concept of ‘greenwashing‘, and am cynical about the mass adoption of green values for marketing purposes. I am sure that if environmental practices did not bring about saving in energy costs, this current bandwagon would not have grown so quickly. So when I see yet another one of these brands crop up, ready to try and grab a slice of the green pound my first reaction is wariness and not, perhaps as it should be, joyousness.

Is there an appropriate niche?

On the apparel sales front, a truly grim battleground for the hearts and minds of the fickle, and ever more fashion conscious, consumer, as so many companies can attest to, I think that this product will struggle to find a niche in the market place. If it is truly going for the luxury sector as the name implies, I struggle to see how many t-shirts they can retail at a high price without a massive brand like Burberry, Gucci, etc. behind the project. The reasons these marques can sell goods at such a high prices is because they have multi-million pound advertising budgets that elevate the consumers perception of the products worth. However, Luxury Redefined is just retailing a simple cream t-shirt and when people can buy an organic t-shirt from Marks and Spencer for £7.50, and get a choice of colour too, I am intrigued how they are going to fare.

To conclude, it is not in my nature to belittle the efforts of others, to rain on people’s parade or to be overtly negative. I have admiration for anyone that had the guts to step up to the plate and have a go at business for themselves but for a project that has been over two years in development I am concerned about the ‘better thinking’ behind this new launch. It is such a competitive market, which this company is coming into late, without the economies of scale and is attempting to sell to the luxury sector but with an unbranded product where people know they can buy something similar, for less than a tenner, at a good high street store. All that remains for me to say is, good luck.

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1. Print with less colours - a one colour print costs much less than a 4 colour one!
2. Print on just one side rather than both sides.
3. Order more items - in this industry, there are volume based price breaks on both garments and printing.
4. Give yourself time - very rushed orders sometimes incur an ‘express’ surcharge. Give yourself at least 7 days when placing an order.
5. When ordering in bulk (500+ pcs) we can normally do an additional discount on white garments - contact us for more details.
6. Have your artwork in the correct format - otherwise we may have to charge to redraw it.

For embroidery, similar points apply though it is not the number of colours that is the issue but the size of the design as embroidery is charged per 1000 stitches.

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The first five thousand people to use the coupon code ‘spring08‘ during the Threadless Spring Cleaning sale will receive $5 off their order on top of the already discounted sale price.

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Matt recently returned from his travels in Australia and Japan and he popped into the office to show show us a ‘t-shirt-in-a tube’ he bought from a fancy t-shirt vending machine store in Tokyo. The shop is a concept store by well know brand UNIQLO UT and as a retail idea, it is pretty fun. The Japanese do seem to have an obsession with vending machines but I reckon this idea would also go down well in a trendy store in the West End of London.

Whilst Indigo don’t sell t-shirts in tubes or vending machines you can check out the range of tees we can customise in our t-shirt catalogue!

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In my opinion, my initial perception of the garment designs are that they are very conservative! The clothing designs reflect the age group they are aimed at, this would appear to be for the middle aged. The designs are extremely smart, simplistic and clean cut which would appeal to professionals.The garments are relatively reasonably priced and there is a variety of different styles available. The styles could be described as a mixture between Zara and French Connection because of their sophistication.

I predict that this shift dress could be a good seller. It incorporates chic sophistication with bold floral. Floral prints are extremely popular on the catwalk at the moment and the empire - cut waist is a particularly flattering design. Monotones are especially ‘hot’ at the moment, black and white is a must. This dress can also be dressed up or dressed down.

I expect with reasonable prices and sophisticated styles Banana Republic is a brand to watch!

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