We spent a lot of time thinking about our t-shirts. Probably more than we should have, considering we didn’t use any of the concepts we thought up. Among them: a guy high-diving through a cloud into a shallow pool of water; a crystal ball with our logo in it; a person standing in a pile of bottles, holding one up and inspecting the neck with a magnifying glass. They were all cute, overthought, and none of them worked.

In Search of a Concept

After a few brainstorming sessions, we had nothing. But in the back of my head the whole time I had a very simple, but very vague idea. Make it look like a hip-hop or death metal shirt. At the time, I was listening to a lot of M.O.P and the drippy death metal aesthetic was pervasive in the Providence music scene.

My co-founders are very musical. Chris is in a quirky local band and Dan has been in a few bands since his high school days. He also wrote and performed a really embarrassing song about me while I was his TA. It was played in class for all to hear, at the request of the professor. And me, I just noodle around on whatever instrument’s in front of me, and not particularly well I might add.

Making it Real

So we’re not exactly emcees, but the band shirt idea resonated with all of us. That’s as far as we could get on our own. We want a band shirt in the Providence music scene style, that somewhat reflects what we do. We’re not artists, so we thought we’d leave the actual design to a professional.

Enter Mickey Z, a local artist responsible for countless show posters around town. I got her number through a friend and called her up. We met at Coffee Exchange and talked for all of fifteen minutes about what we were looking for. Her style, it has to have the company name on it somewhere, and it should allude to computers, and maybe clouds. No circuit boards. Floppy disks are ok.

We left it at that, and two weeks later she came back with a black and white design. We made a few tweaks and after a bit of obsessing over which colors to use, we pass off the design to Devil’s Rainbow to hand screen print a small batch of shirts.

And here it is:

It doesn’t contain our logo. It has no slogan. It doesn’t even have a URL on it. In fact, if you’ve never heard of us before, you might have some trouble reading our company name.

None of that Matters

If I think of all of the shirts that have been handed out to me by companies or conferences, I never end up wearing any of them, and ultimately they just get thrown in the trash (with the exception of Wistia, who have awesome shirts). And a lot of them look like somebody just took their website and slapped it on a t-shirt. Or worse, billboards for tasteless ads. A reflection of a stuffy brand that’s a reflection of an uptight organization, that’s a product of the environment in which it was born (was given life, to its credit).

There are a lot of things I don’t understand. The origin of the universe; the sequence of events that led to the invention of the runcible spoon. The list goes on. But currently, at the top of the list is company t-shirts, and why they suck so hard. It’s like they all forgot that ultimately somebody has to wear them. And that those somebodys are not defined by market segmentation or customer personas. Leave those concepts to be expressed in sales materials. Make shirts that people will wear.

Andrew from Manpacks saw the shirts on the first day we got them from the printer, this year’s Betaspring demo day. His immediate reaction was “People are going to see these shirts and say ‘I wonder what they sound like?’” I’m ok with that. I’m thrilled by that.