A Month in Memoriam: Day 25
So on Day 12 and Day 19, you’ll see two different versions of what looks to be the “same” baseball tee.
They’re different and this, well, this is the original jawn.
At the time, I only had 15 made for my friends who’d volunteered to help me vend at a festival in DC. I called them our “staff shirts” but when I posted the picture on Instagram, people started asking about them.
There are subtle differences between this one and the one we ended up printing multiple runs of, mainly because it’s a different shirt from a different printer.
I needed a rush order to re-up on black And Counting tees that my go-to printer couldn’t accommodate at the time (which was rare) so he directed me to an alternative printer in Virginia.
Unlike the current brand we use, the sleeves on this shirt are tighter, the fabric at the bottom tends to roll and the diagonal seam from the sleeve to the body of the shirt is narrower.
After I made it through the batch from the other printer, I was incredibly thankful that from the very beginning, my go-to printer made it a point to have face-to-face meetings in his shop when it came to new products, adding new names and colorways.
I brought the original raglan and he immediately suggested a better brand. When it came to wanting to print crewnecks, he showed me the difference between a 8.5 ounce and 10 ounce fleece blends.
For the Black Liberation Flag colorway, I looked at the physical jars of ink to decide which shade of red to use.
And when the challenging time came to add more names, we measured out the length and width of the new lists to make sure that the names of our fallen brothers and sisters were not lost at the bottom of the shirt, too scrunched or too close to the collar.
As a small business owner, you truly do appreciate fellow small business owners who take as much pride in creating and maintaining quality goods as you do.
Bless up J!
