In one of those spontaneous nightly actions, my friends Matze, Meike and I decided that neither of us could really find the t-shirts we liked. You know how it is: You see some nice shirts, and they’re alright, but it’s so hard to really find the exact thing you’d like, right? So we started to sketch up some drafts. (Well, Matze did, as he’s the graphics designer. Thanks, M.!)
We only started our little online store a few days back, but there you go. Of course there are hundreds (maybe thousands?) of online shirt stores out there. But we aren’t out for the quick buck. (Hey, we’re not even remotely doing this full-time.) Instead, we opted for a very simple, yet powerful mission:
We want to produce only exactly the shirts we’d like to wear ourselves.
This means funky, funny or somewhat special motives, and really high-quality apparel. Before we print anything, we talk to the local printing store we work with, check out the fabrics, and look into the production quality. Nothing is worse than a shirt that loses half its color or comes out of the washing machine square-shaped. We never liked that, so you won’t get that with our shirts. It’s that simple.
I proudly present the first couple of drafts of keingeschenk.de:
It’s all still quite beta, but we’re working quickly on fixing up all the rough edges. Also, the site is part German, part English as of yet. The important bits are bi-lingual already, though, so go ahead. Also, I’m grateful for all your feedback. (Thanks to Thomas and Max for your quick & productive feedback!)
The motives are, of course, very much subject to individual taste. So far, it’s been pretty morbid and/or ironic. (Except the part about World Robot Domination, of course, which was inspired by a great section of the This Week in Science podcast and Chris Taylor‘s awesome theme song Robots Are Great. We’d like to see this shirt as a tribute to both the radio show and Chris. Welcome, Robot Overlords!)
But there’s one thing I’d like to point out in particular. Since we know about the lack of customization in regular t-shirts (and any other kind of apparel), we thought hard about how we could solve it. On-demand printing would have been an option, but the services we found all had some serious drawbacks we’d like to avoid. On the other end, we could hardly have a huge storage of shirts in all colors and sizes.
So until we’ll figure out the perfect solution to this problem, we’d like to go ahead with a two-step solution: First, we’ll opt for the option we like best, both in terms of cut and color combination – This is what we’ll keep a printed stack of. Second, in order for the technically apt of you out there, we’re offering the opportunity to buy the vector graphics file (no DRM, no commercial use) so you can customize as you like and have it printed on whatever you like: be it stickers, or hoodies, or bags, or your car. (If you’re really nice, and I’m sure you are, you’ll send us a copy to share it with the others. Of course, we’ll give full credit to you if we re-publish it. See more at the FAQ.)
Hopefully that’ll work out for you. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Update: I just noticed that there are still some isses with PayPal in the store. In any case, just drop me a line and I’ll sort it out.
