-My father, who was born in 1941, didn't like me dressing in just a t-shirt.
I'm only 24, so maybe there was a skipped generation of influence and otherwise I'd be wearing t-shirts too. But I don't like to wear t-shirts, except under collared shirts or on extremely warm days or while gardening, etc.
I feel much more confident, professional, suave, etc when I'm wearing a collared shirt. I love a watch poking out, I love rolled up sleeves.
And yet I'd still be behooved into doing something for a t-shirt. I can't explain it.
Agreed, on both counts. I used to wear pretty much only white Ts and only as undershirts, but lately I've been collecting more and more graphic (but not too noticeable) Ts that work well under a collared shirt.
And if just rolling up the sleeves isn't enough for a manual labor situation, you can have a stylish undergarment!
"As our new CEO, Eric [Schmidt] wanted to control costs and to lay down the law his first day in Dodge. And I also wasn't surprised that Larry and Sergey hadn't bothered telling him our marketing group wasn't like others he might have worked with, or, if they had, that he hadn't believed them.
We nodded our heads and interjected, where we could, muttering amens and hosannas when he let us. He seemed to hear some of it. When we let him know that Google t-shirts were our biggest expense, he smiled approvingly.
'That's fine keep doing that. If someone likes our product enough to want to wear our brand, we should do everything we can to make it possible. And it's great for staff morale to have everyone decked out in the company logo.' He would soon be signing off on expenditures for preshrunk cotton in the seven-figure range...
'Why don't we have Google t-shirts for women?' Sergey demanded of me after a female visitor left the office with our standard extra-large men's t-shirt. He was as upset as I'd ever seen him. When a woman in France chastised him about American companies and their enormously oversized t-shirts that no French woman would wear, he insisted that we address the problem once and for all. I ordered women's shirts - more than I thought we could ever give away - but we couldn't keep them in stock. I didn't understand why they were so popular, given our limited female staff, until my cousin thanked me for the one I had sent her and added, 'They're quite see-through. Was that intentional?'
-"I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee 59", Douglas Edwards, p221-222
Exactly, I remember one day throwing out (to good will) 20+ industry shirts, from events, vendors, prizes etc... because I reached an age where the social value wasn't there anymore, infact it became prohibiting towards being taken serious.
I look at the young guys I work with now getting all excited about vendor gear, smile, and reminisce about being the same age, but to me shirts are worthless (and as noted a stigma in some situations).
As has been said here many times just because you don't care about your appearance doesn't mean it isn't important to your life. People will judge you negatively based on it whether you care or not.
Those people who judge you negatively are not going to be good friends - at best they would be some sort of aquaintance. Therefore, whether they judged you negatively or not is not going to matter to you in the least.
Unless of course that person is someone of authority over you - then you are screwd.
One caveat: if you're going to make a t-shirt, do it right and spend the money to print it on decent material, i.e., soft, not scratchy, fitting decently, etc... (American Apparel's t-shirts are nice.) Any cheaply made t-shirts I get go straight to Goodwill.
It is very strange. I love the AA women's cuts, but they are way smaller than most women's clothing sizes. It's really awkward to give them out because I have to tell people that they're going to need a bigger size.
I don't even think this is necessary. I've done work that is totally beyond what is commensurate with reward for really shitty shirts.
Companies can almost certainly get by with poor materials, simply because most people don't account for that in the moment, and likely lack access to that information anyway.
But do you wear a shitty t-shirt after you receive it? Part of a company's motivation for giving out t-shirts is cheap publicity — people literally walk around with that company's logo on their chest. They're unlikely to do that though if the shirt fits poorly or is otherwise uncomfortable.
I don't quite get the analogy. Yes, things have value to people even if it isn't paper money. But saying "t-shirts are currency" carries about the same weight as saying "hugs are currency". Title seems misleading.
When the companies are 'current', t-shirts can be used active in trade, much like valid currency in circulation in our economy.
When the companies shut down or get bought out, the t-shirts instead behave like old, defunct currency that become collectibles and memorabilia. They're items that evoke memories and eras gone by. I have a Conner Peripherals [1] shirt from 1994 that's in my drawer which someone in my family must have gotten from Finis; the t-shirt was made in celebration of a product launch that year [2]. The t-shirt design is godawful but it's endearing.
Agreed, 50/50 is the best you can get (in terms of feel). I'd also add that you should work on making a design thats more about the essence of what your company does, rather than just a logo
Make sure you read the comment below by Mukund as well at: http://bestengagingcommunities.com/2011/12/31/why-mentos-is-..., where he talked about how Mentos act as currency in India. It's a short blip and there's nothing about its geographical significance nor how widespread the effect is. But it's still some post that provides an interesting look at other cultures and quite a fun read.
The same thing happenend in Argentina a few years ago. Not enough coins were coined, and since the bus used a machine that only took coins, thye were in high demand (there was even a point where you could sell coins for up to 120% of their nominal worth). It was obnoxiously common at teh time for drugstores to give you candy instead of change in coins, simply because they didn't have enough of them.
On a similar topic, I recommend this article about how Tide (yes, the detergent that comes in the memorable orange container) became a drug currency [1].
I remember last year at SXSW, I was taking my box of tshirts back to the hotel so I could sort through and organize them. I put the box down for a second to give my friend a shirt. A mass of people flocked around me and within 20 minutes my box of 200 shirts was gone. People didnt even have a clear idea of that the shirts were for, but it had a heart on it so that was cool enough.
The insight here is that everybody takes t-shirts as alternative payment method for situations where paying real money would be a social faux-pas. T-shirts are more like letters of gratitude.
You can give your friends funny t-shirts to thank them helping you move, but you can't give them $20 instead without insulting them by implying that their time is worth so little.
-My father, who was born in 1941, didn't like me dressing in just a t-shirt.
I'm only 24, so maybe there was a skipped generation of influence and otherwise I'd be wearing t-shirts too. But I don't like to wear t-shirts, except under collared shirts or on extremely warm days or while gardening, etc.
I feel much more confident, professional, suave, etc when I'm wearing a collared shirt. I love a watch poking out, I love rolled up sleeves.
And yet I'd still be behooved into doing something for a t-shirt. I can't explain it.