Random Thoughts After Being In Biz For a Few Weeks
Posted by Shea Gunther - 25/10/08 at 06:10:39 pm
Here are a few quick items from the first few weeks of life.
• Printing white ink on black shirts is hard. Like, really hard. I’ve laid out a lot of bad ink on a lot of bad shirts, my pile of black testers shirts (the shirts I test print on using ever square inch) is growing high. I’m getting better each time ’round, but daaaamn does it make you appreciate the fine art of screen printing.
• We’re up over 100 shirts sold, most of those sales (80) came from the Boston stop in John Green’s Paper Towns booktour. Nerdfigthers love Nerdfighter shirts. We’ve got 10 more Nerdfighter stops all around the country in November and I’m damn excited to get a lot of great shirts out there.
• Sales on the site have been slow and steady. We’re not really doing any promotion yet as I’ve been so busy getting Nerdfighter shirts ready for the Tour de Nerdfighting.
• At the end of November we’ll start putting out one new shirt design a week. I have a huge backstock of great designs and we’ll be tapping into our partners brands and projects, look for shirts from Lisa Nova, What the Buck Show, Super Secret Project, and Pop Crunch by the end of the year. We’re planning on sticking to one design a week for 2009, which will put a healthy 65 designs or so in our portfolio this time next year.
• I was super sick this week. Sore throats suck. If you follower me on Twitter you could have read me cry about it live.
• I ordered the full color line in samples of American Apparel Organics. Look for lots of new base colors.
• Women’s shirts are on the way!
• I’m building a photo and light stand to shoot shirts on. My picnic table worked to get the site up, but some of the shirts look dingy in the pix.
• We’ll have WAY better looking shirt models down the road.
• Michael Gregoire, a fellow Mainer, is our new Wordpress guy. He added “Buy Now” buttons to the front page and shirt posts. He’s rad and uses Twitter.
Onward and upward. Shirts hooooooooooooooooooooo!
Nerdfighters FTW!
Posted by Shea Gunther - 21/10/08 at 07:10:58 amI get a lot of satisfaction out of putting cool shirts on people. Julian (above) is filled with all sorts of Awesome.
Woot!
The Meatspace Tees Website is Open for Business
Posted by Shea Gunther - 07/10/08 at 12:10:56 pm
The site is up!
And it’s not too ugly, if I do say so myself. I made myself go to bed at 2:30am after a long night of web monkeying and finished up the last glaring loose ends today. The Meatspace Tees website is officialy open for business Go buy a shirt.
“Republicans Are Dicks” is going on the press today
Posted by Shea Gunther - 18/09/08 at 09:09:17 amI’m printing this today. Republicans Are Dicks.
If you want to pre-order, email me at shea@meatspacetees.com. I’ll be mailing out shirts tomorrow afternoon so you’ll get your shirt by this time next week. They’ll be up for sale officially on our website by Monday at the latest. If you pre-order I’ll eat the shipping and save you $5, you pay just $20.
+7 Wonk Geek points if you know who all three Dicks are.
We Have Liftoff!!! Meatspace Tees Has Actually Printed TShirts
Posted by Shea Gunther - 15/09/08 at 12:09:37 pm
We’re up and running! It’s going to be a long week, shirts for sale on the site by Friday. Hell yeah!!!
And yes, I’m hanging the first shirt on the wall. Instant classic.
Our Green Ink Choice: International Coatings Company’s GEN IV is PVC, Phthalate, Pesticide Free
Posted by Shea Gunther - 31/08/08 at 08:08:12 pm
Conventional plastisol ink can be some pretty nasty stuff, with PVC, heavy metals, Phthalates, all sorts of organo-baddies, and even pesticides floating around.
I was concerned for my own health because one of the steps of the Tshirt making process involves flashing the shirt under a heated dryer to cure the ink. I’m not keen on spending hours in the shop breathing in vaporized PVC and Phthalates, but more than that I didn’t like the idea of putting out (hopefully) thousands of shirts made using toxic chemicals.
We’re trying to take this thing as green as we can get with Meatspace Tees and our choice of ink is a big part of that commitment. Luckily the ink manufacturers have been paying attention (and no doubt prodded by some tough European safety standards) and are coming out with PVC and crew free choices.
We’re starting off with International Coatings Company’s GEN IV Series. It’s free of PVCs, Phthlates, heavy metals, pesticides and it cleans up with water. Regular plastisol requires a pretty nasty petroleum based solvent to clean up. The GEN IV Series handles like a regular plastisol ink to some degree, it’s not quite as forgiving for being left out over night and can dry in the screen, though ICC says a few good print strokes will easily clear it. It will soon come with a Pantone color matching system using 11 colors out of the initial 18 available.
You can read all about the new GEN IV ink at the International Coatings Company. We buy our GEN IV ink from the good folks at Atlas Screen Supply Company.
My First Few Screens Are Not Pretty
Posted by Shea Gunther - 27/08/08 at 09:08:27 pm
My first few screens are ugly.
Screens used for printing are coated with a liquid emulsion that acts as a stencil, blocking out the parts of the design you don’t want the ink to go through. You coat the screen on both sides with the goopy pink emulsion with a special applicator scoop. It’s definitely something that is very easy to screw up the first few times you do it.
My first few screens are streaky with a consistently inconsistent thickness with run-over emulsion leaking out onto the frame.
I’d take a picture, but my camera batteries are dead and I’m not super motivated to submit my ugly screens to internet archival. Let’s just leave it at “they’re damn ugly”.
The next ones will be better, I’ll move faster and more even.
Hello world! Meatspace Tees Comes to Life!
Posted by Shea Gunther - 27/08/08 at 08:08:29 pm
Hi, I’m Shea. this is my t-shirt company. I have five awesome partners named Hank, Muhammad, David, Alan, and Ryan. We’re starting a little tshirt company named Meatspace Tees. I do all the work out of my house in Cumberland, Maine, a small town outside the small city of Portland. I’ll be blogging about everything I go through as I get the company off the ground, messy mistakes and heady successes all.
A little about myself- I’m 30 years old and a father of two beautiful little girls. My ex-wife Heather and I have a really great co-parenting relationship and we’re raising the girls together. I’ve been working as an entrepreneur since I started a dotcom named Zoom Culture when I was 21. Since then I’ve been the founder of four other big companies, raised over $20M in total funding, hired hundreds of employees, and have had a lot of great ups and downs. I’ve had an exclusively green focus since I was a founder of Renewable Choice Energy in 2001, now the leading provider of wind credits in the nation.
Most recently I’ve been working as the Publisher of EarthFirst.com, playing Ultimate Frisbee, and trying to get out running a few times a week. I think the word “rhubarb” is awesome.
This should be fun. Here we go!
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