Closing Thoughts

With the announcement that I am closing GrowndFlore I thought it would be a good time to do a top 5 t-shirts ever for the brand known for “where awesome tees feel at home”. When I say top 5, I mean in one person’s opinion as only a couple of these are top sellers.

Woo Wee

This is my favorite tee to wear, still to this day, I love wearing the t-shirt. I’ve printed it on over 8 pastel colors, I sold it in kids sizes and it goes down as one of those ironic semi-humorous shirts. I love it on yellow. The inspiration for the shirt came from a line in a Train song (Thanks Pat- you continue to inspire me) and the ever on going battle I have with the street cred of 20 year old Miche mixed with the sensibility of 30 year old Miche. Growing up is gangsta!

My Favorite Foods

Probably my best designed t-shirt of all time and the one that I feel the best putting out there are a representative of my “artwork” (used very loosely). My favorite foods is simply that, some attempts at drawing and font work, the two ideas I creatively build the entire company on. Love this guy on organic cotton and I’m sitting on 2 unworn of this tee in my size so future years to come I’ll have this to wear.

Roshambo Recycle

This tees is one of those great myths to me. When I thought it up on a trip to Florida I thought it was brilliant, I had assumed I just came up with my new top seller. This one never sold well… I can remember multiple buyers telling me they didn’t get it. “Why wouldn’t people use scissors?”, one buyer once said to me, “It beats paper”. I can remember my old showroom had this printed in like 15 color ways and no one bought it. Over the years we sold a few but it never took off. Maybe it’ll do better now that it’s vintage.

Mr. Roboto

One of our best selling tees of all time and one that we launched with 2007. It can still be found in boutiques today but mostly in kids sizes where it did almost 3/4 of it’s sales. That mix of robots and vintage humor seemed to be perfect. Back when I drew this I did the sketch by hand and then scanned it into the computer using an old hand-me-down scanner. You can still see the imperfections when it prints but that is what I love about it. This is also the first t-shirt anyone ever came after me about infringing on their license rights. A brief conversation smoothed it all over and it remains a top tee in my mind.

Carnivore Myth

This tee was actually part of a whole series of tees designed for the launch of Poindexter Delicious which originally included a bunch of food themes tees… Talking chicken legs or tacos and a view of ironic intestines such as a pig that ate bacon or a cactus that drank water. While many of those were scrapped as Dex would eventually become all about the title character and his friends, I kept one of them in the GrowndFlore line. This herbivore that loved steak… Which to me was the ultimate in unproven irony. This was one of the first of my tees I ever saw someone wearing in public that wasn’t a friend. That moment sticks with you no matter what.

Thanks for reading my vent about things that I care about way more than you do.

Also a special shout out to all the people and shops that have helped along the way… Especially Dave Anders the greatest sales rep ever who gave me credibility with retailers that never would have taken my call and Lydia & Bette from Kiddie Shack for always supporting the brand and helping make Awesome Enough a reality.