Since I’ve become an amateur t-shirt designer in an attempt to support this site, I’ve learned a lot. One of the interesting
things is where antiwar hockey fans live. I’ve sold gear to folks where you might expect to find lefty hockey fans, places like Ontario, Oregon, California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. But I’ve sold even more in Virginia, Ohio, Kansas (!), North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Florida and Arizona. I’ve even sold a sticker to somebody in Hawaii.

One of the oddest lessons I’ve learned is that you never know what people are going to like. I’ve developed several designs over the last couple months, with these two tossed off just to try to hit on a theme:

The general idea being a star as the center of a distressed design. I had an old Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax t-shirt that I really liked, that was yellow with a blue star on the front, and I kind of wanted to hit on that.

The trouble was, the blue turns green against the yellow fabric with Cafe press’ dye sublimation process, and I didn’t want to mess around trying to get the color right. So I pretty much just left the design up there out of laziness. The “Pass. Shoot. Score!” shirt was another experiment using the star as a central theme, but I thought the design was too busy. But again, I just left it out there. Now, suddenly, both of these designs are selling like hot cakes. WTF?!? I was seriously going to pull both of them, and they’re both outselling any of my other, more refined designs. Both of these designs have been in the top five when you search on “hockey” at Cafe Press over the last few days (the “pass shoot score” design has recently fallen some, but it’s still on the first page of results).

There’s one design I haven’t sold any of yet, that’s specific to Oregon, Washington, BC and Alberta. The front says “Left Coast Hockey” and on the back, superimposed over the red star (I like stars!), are the cities of the Western Hockey League’s Western Conference:

I bought one for myself, and I plan on wearing it to a Winter Hawks game one of these nights.

Anyway, thank you to all who have bought my designs on Cafe Press. And don’t forget, if there is any issue with quality, please take advantage of the Cafe Press satisfaction guarantee. They like to fix things.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Hockey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.