I’ve had this shirt since 2019.
It’s been washed weekly ever since. The cotton’s going at the shoulders now, which turns out not to be the cotton’s fault, but that’s a longer story and my other half tells it better than I do.
The print hasn’t moved.
That’s the reason we’re doing this again. Not a philosophy. A shirt that outlasted the seven years I gave it.
Two of us
Chester. One of us does the money, the parcels and the replies. The other does the site, the pictures and the words. There’s no office and nobody else.
We had a go at this once before and it didn’t get going, for reasons that were nothing to do with the shirts.
What it is
Organic cotton, grown in North India. Screen printed at a factory on the Isle of Wight that runs on renewable power. There’s a code in the care label, and when the shirt’s finally finished you send it back and it gets remade into another one.
We buy a run. When it’s gone it’s gone, which isn’t a sales tactic, it’s just what happens when two blokes buy a box of shirts.
The crown
It doesn’t say anything. That’s the point of it.
There’s a thing about the name we found out afterwards. The Albion press is an English printing press from 1820, and you recognise one by the crown cast on the top. William Morris had one. He spent his life arguing that machines had made everything shoddy.
We didn’t know any of that when we started. We’ll take it.
What we won’t do
No polyester. Plastic clothes shed plastic into the water every wash, and we’d rather not sell that.
No prints that fall off. We tried the quick way of printing once. The pattern came away in the machine. So that’s out too.