Friday, November 2, 2007

The humble t-shirt

Working around the shop is hard on the ole wardrobe. Over-lubed chains, greasy bearings, dripping hydraulic lines, Chinese food........all take their toll. This is probably why the t-shirt has almost become the business card of the bike industry. They get used until they are demoted to shop rag status and replaced by the next one in line. This is probably the reason that we have done literally every-color-under-the-sun in the First Flight Bikes t-shirts.

When we brought Mountain Goat Cycles back, it was time to work on t-shirt designs. The first one we did was the old style head badge shirt. [img]http://www.firstflightbikes.com/_borders/GoatTs.JPG[/img]
After we designed the new decals and modernized the Goat, we did a two color design. [img]http://www.firstflightbikes.com/_borders/NewGoatT.JPG[/img] This has become our "stock" shirt that we will keep on making. It was kinda fun to come up with new designs and we decided to offer the t-shirts in limited numbers, like Princess Di commemorative plates. We had done about 85 of the first design which seemed like a weird number so we decide to go with 100 for the second edition shirt. The original Mountain Goat catalog art, circa 1981, was a great design so it became number 2 in the series. [img]http://www.firstflightbikes.com/_borders/GOATLTD2.JPG[/img] We ordered 100 of them divided amongst 5 sizes.

Number two was selling nicely so we wanted to have number 3 waiting in the wings. I talked to my brother-in-law, Gabi Campanario , who has worked in the art departments of various newspapers, including the USA Today, for ideas. He sent a couple of designs and they were all great. We chose the artwork for number 3 and had a run of 100 shirts done in this design. We have only had them for a week and it has proven to be very popular already. Check it out [img]http://www.firstflightbikes.com/_borders/LTD3Back.JPG[/img] If you like 'em, go to www.mountaingoatcycles.com and pick one up.

As the old commercials used to advise "collect 'em all"