Yes, we have officially discontinued all of our original collection of t-shirts. Yes, those crazy soft, quick to perfectly fade and wear out OGs that we first started making back before the shop was even a shop.
Gasp, WHAAAAT???
We quit making our shirts because we have been hard at work creating a new type of t-shirt.
The short story: We found that while our t-shirts were super rad and super soft and a LOT of people loved them, there were a lot of people for whom the fabric and cut weren't ideal. So for the past year we've been working on developing a t-shirt that would just be more for more people.
Imagine if you found the perfect 90s band t-shirt at the thrift store but in your real size. It's like that-- heavier weight but perfectly broken in. The collar to sleeve to length ratio feels real good.
And while our tees are always unisex, we are really stoked to be introducing a women's cut. This is not some babydoll tee, let me tell you. It's like taking your favorite t-shirt and modifying the proportions so that it's not too long and doesn't hug at the hips or come down to your elbows.
Caley is wearing the women's SURF EAST LAKE t-shirt in size Small.
Now here's a little bit of the longer story: Morgan's family was in the clothing manufacturing industry for four generations. Her great-grandfather immigrated to this country as a refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution. He set up shop as a dress maker in the garment district of NYC. By the 1970s, we were a cut and sew operation making mainly t-shirts. Through the early 2000s, if you owned a DKNY, Calvin Klein, BMW, among other brands, it was probably made by her family in Cullman, Alabama.
Morgan's grandmother and uncle on the sewing floor, Halloween 1990.
Little Morgan, by the time cards.
It was a really magical childhood to grow up on the floor of a sewing factory. Her first job, picking up buttons out of the cracks in the cement. A nickel a piece.
By the early 2000s, overseas manufacturing was killing American manufacturing left and right, and the family closed the doors of the factory so the huge family of employees could go into trade programs and move on with life.
We got to make these shirts for the CFDA after 9/11.
It has always been a dream of ours to pick up the family torch again. So here we are, making our own t-shirts. It's not a fancy operation. There's no factory or family of employees. You may even see us at an industrial washing machine from time to time in our stories. Because we figured out our secret sauce. And we are cooking it up with every shirt run.
Grab a few for the holidays. You're going to love them for a long time.
