Dan Interviews the Crew From Shirts Taste Good (Dot Com!)

It’s funny how you meet people sometimes. At my day gig where I am a graphic designer, a curious card came across my desk it said www.shirtstastegood.com and had an interesting logo on it. So I visited the site, and I was surprised I hadn’t heard of these guys before. They were not only doing something really interesting but they were also local, so I thought I should sit down with them for a chat for Geekadelphia.  A couple of weeks later, I finally got out to see their impressive studio and print-shop which was made out of a converted barn. I also got to ask them some questions about their site how it got started. I think they had a lot of interesting things to say not only about starting a t-shirt business but doing it right.

How did the idea for the site www.shirtstastegood.com come about?

Todd: George and Doug were doing screen printing, and we(Todd and Lou) were on the internet doing web development. I was doing a lot of design stuff, and I think the main idea came about because we were on YouTube all day. On our previous jobs that’s all we really did was watch YouTube videos. People at work that’s what they would do is spread YouTube videos to each other.

George and Doug were running their custom t-shirt print company for a while and we started to notice that there were some people printing custom YouTube inspired t-shirts, but there really wasn’t any site that was kinda pulling them all together. A site that only did YouTube inspired t-shirts. So we felt there was a niche to fill and we thought there was a market for a site that did only YouTube inspired t-shirts. We also noticed the ones that were out there already and thought we could do it better and make more exciting t-shirts. That’s sorta how it all came about, and it was easy to pull it all together because they were already doing custom printing. We already had the web stuff, you know working. So we put the whole thing together relatively quick, because all the stuff were we doing we were all relatively familiar with. So that’s how it all got started.

So where did the name for the site www.shirtstastegood.com come from?

George: It just kinda popped in my head one day, I was thinking of names and there are always the boring names that all end in “tees”. But shirts taste good is just obscure I guess, we wanted something that would catch someone’s attention.

Was that the same idea with the logo as well?

Todd: It definitely grabs your attention I wasn’t a 100% sure on the name either, but as I started to do he logo I was like, “alright I am really starting to like this, now it’s going to stick out in people’s minds”. I just used these super bright big red lips they’re a little edgy you could say.

So how long have you been producing shirts?

George: Together the four of us, I guess a couple of months.

Lou: The site officially went live on June 9th. We built the site pretty quickly together and first started working on it march 1st .

Todd: March 1st I started designing the first shirt, we launched on June 9th with 20 finalized designs then the goal was to do one new one every week.

What made you decide to make shirts inspired by YouTube videos?

Todd: YouTube is great there’s just so much funny stuff, and there are so many people out there who love these videos. We just felt like people would love shirts with that funny content on them. We would just discuss with each other some of our favorite videos, and we would always be like “that would be awesome on a t-shirt or that would be so sweet on a t-shirt”. So after like thinking about it over and over again, it was like a no brainer for us. We just thought there was so much funny stuff that could be done with it. It’s turned out great so far, there are so many ideas floating around between the four of us. We all wanna do different  shirts and YouTube is endless inspiration for us.

What inspired you guys to start the site?

George: We have always talked about doing our own brand, but we could never do a surf or a skate brand, we surf. There is just so much competition and since we have the internet background, I thought it was a lot easier to get into and start selling some kind of funny shirt through an e-commerce site.

Lou: The defining moment, I would say came because we were always kicking around, “should we do a funny shirt site?”. But there’s a gazillion funny shirt sites out there and your competing directly with busted or snort. What we really needed was  a niche to fill and it came in February I guess. When Todd came up with the idea, what if we did t-shirts solely focused on YouTube, and as soon as he said it we were all like that is a great idea. Because right now everything is scattered on the net there is no one place people are going to find high quality YouTube inspired t-shirts and that is what we are.

What is the creative process from selecting a video on YouTube, to the printing of the t-shirt?

Todd: Part of it has to do with what videos seem to be the most popular at the time. All 4 of us discuss what we are going to do next, it’s never really like one of us is like “We’re doing this one next, and that’s it!”. There are so many different options, we kinda just think about what would be funny. Because some videos are popular for a week, then they will just disappear. So we try to pick ones that we think will be around a while, and also the videos that are popular at the moment.

What goes into designing a good shirtstastegood.com shirt?

Todd: Well a lot of watching the videos over and over again, constantly. Racking my brain about what’s the shirt going to be about, because some of the shirts aren’t so obvious. Not all of the videos you can just translate into a shirt. You kinda have to be a little clever with it. We’ll bounce ideas off each other, it’s never just me trying to do them myself. I am always bouncing ideas off these guys and they are throwing stuff at me, and then we will kinda settle on a design. From there I will just get to work on it, sometimes Ill do sketches or I will look at a lot of references online to do the design. Once I have the design I’ll make some mockups, sometimes I show them to some friends to get some initial reactions and the we’ll refine it from there. It all happens pretty quickly. Once we’re all happy with it, I will pass it along to Doug and George and then we get to do the actual screen-printing. First we do some test prints trying to get the colors right, that’s a big process right there. Then trying to decide what color shirt to use, because we have to decide what we are going to order and what’s going to look the best with the colors we picked out. Then we sell it and ship it.

Being a screen printer myself I know ordering shirts of the internet can often be a crap shoot, from shirt that fall apart to designs that come off after 2 washes, what are your printing methods and what kinds of shirts do you use on the site?

George: All American Apparel shirts, I think they probably have the best knit and they take ink well. So all of our shirts are American apparel and we screen print everything ourselves. No heat transfers or even some of the newer techniques like foil. We wont go near those, because it doesn’t hold up as well I think. It’s all hand screen printed because we looked at getting an automated press in here, and it seems like if you have the volume you can focus on putting out numbers. But you don’t get to see every shirt that is coming off the press and your basically sliding on the shirt, machine prints and it someone else pulls it off. The shirt goes out the door and may have a misprint on it. We do everything by hand here.

With the speed of passing trends, is there ever an urgency to “strike while the iron is hot” as they say when producing shirts?

Todd: Yeah I would say so, we have even seen some ideas we have had come and go and we’ll decide maybe we should pass that idea up. We also feel there are so many videos that have lasted a while, and there are definitely enough that we can get inspiration from. We are always looking for the next new thing, because you never know. Stuff on YouTube happens so fast, you know like within a week a video could from hundreds to having millions of views. We are also always on the social networks to see what people are talking about, and what stuff’s funny. It’s a constant effort to keep track of all these videos that are out there and what people are really excited about. In that way its super exciting, it’s always going to be something new.

Have you even been contacted by someone from a video you produced a shirt of?

Lou: The one I am wearing right now Keyboard Cat, we put it up and within two days there was a comment on Video Gum by Todd’s girlfriend that said “For a great keyboard cat t-shirt check out shirtstastegood”. It was related to the post because some one earlier on the thread had asked about keyboard Cat t-shirts, so we immediately got crushed on there for spamming their site. Even though it was related content, and one of the commenters who also happened to be the guy behind keyboard Cat sent us an email, to us and asked us to take down the shirt. He was  said he was coming out with a t-shirt line of his own through Hot Topic.

Todd: We were happy to do it, we understand.

Lou: So we took it down, and we aren’t selling it anymore only because we are all broke and if they did choose to pursue to sue us, it’s just easier for us to take it down.

Lou: I wouldn’t say we were happy to take it down, it was a bummer

Todd: It was a bummer because we really liked the shirt that we made.

George: We have also gotten the complete opposite reaction from the guy who did the sneezing panda video. He loved the shirt so much he put a link directly to us on the YouTube page and embedded a link to it in the actual video on YouTube.

Todd: That was super nice of him and relatively soon after we launched too, so we weren’t sure what people’s reactions were going to be. So we were super excited when this happened.

Lou: Yeah he liked the shirt and linked to us, I mean we sent him a shirt as a thank you, because it was super nice of him. So we have the two ends of the spectrum on the one side there is the people who like it, and see what we are doing and are nice enough to help out. Then, the other side is like “Take down that shirt!”. We are stilln new but people are catching on to what we are about.

So how can someone submit an Idea for a shirt to you guys?

Lou: We built in a suggestions page that right now if you find a YouTube video that you want us to make a shirt out of you can just paste it in the YouTube link, and we’ll auto imbed it into the site so others can view what the last 15 recent suggestions are. One of the things that George started doing is, everyday or every other day we are doing favorite video suggestions on our blog. So out of all the suggestions that are posted in one day we pick one of them as our favorite, and put it up on the blog.

Are you going to let people vote on designs via the suggestion page?

Todd: We would like to build that out, because there are so many different things you can do with it, we can all see the potential in it. It could be a place where people could go and see tons of funny videos that people are suggesting. If you built some sort of voting system, that would be even better because all the best stuff gets pushed to the top. Like a digg for silly videos.

Lou: We are taking that into account, because then internally we can see how many times a video has been suggested. Something like the otters holding hands t-shirt that’s coming out soon, because a lot of girls and girlfriends were suggesting that one.

So finally what  YouTube videos are you guys watching? Todd: The one Lou just mentioned the otter video, that one’s been fun to design. Because otters are these weird animals. When I started the shirt I was like what the hell does an otter look like?

Also Impossible is the opposite of possible

your business card is crap

Jones big ass truck rental

and Mr. Spriggs barbeque.

Lou: The Sulu dance

We’ll do it live and now we have a t-shirt I love it just that much more

George: Everyone’s a critic I really like that one right now and Awesome Daves counting channel