a t-shirt design for Blockwick 2, showing green outlines of blocks arrange in a diamond and viewed from an orthogonal perspective

A T-Shirt for Blockwick

Yes, it’s official, after seven years of making apps, we’ve finally come out with a t-shirt. The design was a collaboration between Michael and myself and was created in honor of the Blockwick universe.

blockwick-t-on-cb

You may recall a while ago we were planning on making a Blockwick 2 t-shirt, but because of some rookie mistakes we did not get it printed. Back then we made three designs, and we couldn’t pick our favorite so we ended up doing a poll.

survey-results

The design that won the poll was pretty fun, but it turns out that we were using too many colors for the screen printer. So we decided to put the t-shirt project on hold until we had a little more time to work on a design that we were happy with.

So this time around to simplify we put one together, and sent it straight over to Cotton Bureau. If you aren’t familiar with this company, we’d like to tell you about them. They are a small screen printing shop based out of Pittsburgh, PA. They focus on small batch, quality product, and have been great to work with. The unique thing is how they decide what to print.

cotton-bureau-home

Anybody can submit a design to their editorial team; they pick the best submissions to put up on the home screen. At any given time there are around 72 designs for customers to choose from. The trick is that out of all the designs, they only print ones that get at least 12 orders. Each design stays up for two weeks, and any that get 11 orders or less get scrapped. The downside is that there are lots of great designs that don’t get printed, and the onus to sell the t-shirt really rests with the designers who make the tees.

We are guessing for an indie company of three people that’s been around for seven years we should be able to sell at least 12 t-shirts, but it’s a bit more difficult than you’d expect, especially for lone designers. Anyways, we’d love it if you picked up a Blockwick t-shirt (we are almost up to twelve, but we need a few more orders). Head over to cottonbureau.com to pre-order now.

Update 9/25/2015: The t-shirt is going to print (yay!), but unfortunately if you did not get an order in before the deadline, you are out of luck. Its a one-run, limited-edition tee afterall. If you missed the train, and really want some KB threads, let us know; we may be exploring less transient methods of selling t-shirts in the future.