Update:: A lot of people have been asking where to actually get these! Purchase a mullet shirt here.
I first thought about shirts several months ago, but not in the way a normal business owner would typically think about shirts. Did I want them for self-promotion? No. Did I want them to have anything to do with my business? Not really. Did I want them to be kind of ridiculous and have little to do with my actual job? Absolutely. Did my mom call my t-shirt “very strange”? Perfect. So why get t-shirts in the first place? Because t-shirts are awesome… and I like them. Read the story behind the mullet below.
*Note: Geoff’s shirt is a little wrinkled, but we don’t have time for ironing in this house and he’s a guy, so we figured it’d be realistic, right?
A large part of this was a visit to Amplified Art Gallery during First Friday one month. Geoff and I love Amplified Art. It’s a “music themed gallery and boutique” in its own words and they mainly display concert poster art. We go in there a lot because it’s different and I just like the feel of their store. They also have the best t-shirts. They’re Amplified Art shirts… and some of them are related to music, and some are more random. We both have one, and they’re the softest t-shirts I’ve ever owned in my liiife and I could tell that they were hand screen-printed. This got me thinking about how it’d be pretty cool to do the same for us. Have t-shirts that are soft, bright colors, and kind of random. We like fun… and I’m not really big into super obvious promotion, but damn it’d be fun to have a shirt. :)
To design these magnificent shirts, I wanted someone with a fun, quirky style and decided to enlist Kristin Mason, the invitation creator for Shannon and Phil’s wedding, whose invitations I loved so much. She did an incredible job creating a bunch of different designs for us to choose from, all of which were fantastic. It was hard to choose, but the mullet design literally made me laugh out loud each time. It was seemingly random and unconnected to my job, which I loved. It was not an obvious promotion. However, I really love it because honestly – I do need to know when to draw the line between business and partying. I work a lot of hours and do at least some work for the business 7 days a week. Running my business is basically my life and I take it pretty seriously. Sometimes it’d be helpful to party a little. Or a lot. I can also see it as the balance between actually running a wedding business and attending the wedding “parties” themselves, which we always have a tremendous amount of fun during. So on the surface, it’s a mullet shirt complete with silhouetted mullet and mullet labels (the business side, the party side, and the Mullet-Dixon line). Beneath the surface, I can identify with it… as strange as that sounds. I loved it. Kristin, I love you, and you did a fantastic job.
So when I thought about who would actually make the shirt, I thought about my favorite shirt in my closet which is my Amplified Art shirt. It’s the softest thing I’ve ever owned. So I called Amplified Art and asked who made their t-shirts and to my delight was told that they make them in-house themselves. :) This was perfect! Ryan and Diana were amazing, giving us information on the shirts and colors they could order.
I went with American Apparel because they are soft, have good colors, practice an environmentally friendly business, operate in America, pay their workers a respectable wage, and support the legalization of gay marriage, which is important to me, Geoff, and our friends. They aren’t perfect, but they’re about as good as a t-shirt making company can get. Geoff chose the color scheme for the guy shirts, and I chose it for the girls.
Amplified Art ordered our shirts and printed them. This was very important to me: I wanted to support another local business in the making of these shirts. Also, I used to hand screen-print shirts way back in high school art class, and it’s just such a cool process that I fell in love. Every shirt is a little different and a little unique, and we are supporting a local art gallery that does great business for downtown Raleigh. We are so happy with how they turned out, and Ryan and Diana, we thank you and will definitely be back for more!
Currently there are three sizes for the guys and three for the girls. We’ll see how that goes. It’s pretty darn expensive to buy t-shirts in bulk like this, so we didn’t get every conceivable size for that reason at the moment. Right now we’ll just see if we can make the money back and then we’ll go from there. ;) But I thought it would be a fun project, something cool to work on, and look, Ma, I have my own t-shirt! Thank you so much to Team T-Shirt (Geoff, Kristin, Amplified Art) and to the blog stalkers – I love you and I hope you get a chuckle out of the mullet shirt.
