Introducing our Budget t-shirt: the Fruit of the Loom Original T. This t-shirt goes under a lot of different names, but it’s the basic one in FOTL’s range.
BEST FOR: We think this is a good basic choice for promotional giveaways to corporate uniforms to band merch. It’s not really a fashion t-shirt due to the weight and cut, but it’s still really good quality and will keep its shape and colour for many, many washes.
It’s a great value, simple shirt. Straight up and down, this is not a fitted t-shirt so if you’re not sure who will be wearing it and you need make sure they fit, this will work. Screenprinting looks good on it due to the ringpsun cotton – which has a finely knitted gauge for enhanced printability.
There’s actually plenty of ways to fold a t-shirt, but this method is our favourite because you end up with a neat and tidy fold that shows off the design on the front of the shirt, and it fits perfectly into an envelope for posting. Using this method the label is also easily checked, even when the t-shirt is fully folded, so you can keep track of sizes easily.
Step 1
Lay your t-shirt face down on a flat surface. It doesn’t have to be orange. Just flat.
One of the most common things people need to do with their screen printed shirts is get them posted out, e.g. to their customers, or to their team. But that isn’t as straightforward as you might think. If you’re selling online, you’re going to need to know how much is your t shirt weight so you can charge or budget the right amount. And if you’re posting to another country, a small difference can really increase the shipping cost.
You may remember that we recently launched Ramp For Good, our project to support organisations doing great work in their communities. By providing free or heavily subsidised t-shirts we hope to help improve their ability to be visible, raise funds, or promote themselves.
Early last week we were in the final stages of organising our next shipment of t-shirts to an organisation making the world a better place. Suddenly we got a message out of the blue from a small group of people in Manchester. They were organising a 24hr marathon of back to back matches. Their cause was to raise funds for the victims of the awful murders of people at the Ariana Grande concert in their city. They needed Manchester Marathon Match t-shirts for the volunteers who would be helping them run the event.
Keen IO are a San Francisco startup that makes it easy to create real-time data applications through the use of their API. What this means in non-tech terms is that 60,000 people use Keen IO APIs to capture, analyze, and embed data analytics into their products. It allows them to use all this data and present it in a usable way, through graphs, charts, tables etc.
Because they’re a technical product, their primary users tend to be developers. And to engage their audience they’ve hidden* a brilliant free t-shirt Easter egg in their API documentation – for our non-technical readers, this is the “manual” that their users must consult to know how to implement Keen IO’s code properly.
We all approve of motivated, engaged teams, right? Like this lovely bunch of humans from Bold.
Whether you’re a team member or someone who’s managing a team, having a group of people who enjoy working together in concerted way is absolutely critical to success. If your team isn’t harmonious and effective, you hugely limit your chance of achieving the team’s aims.
Or, to put it in another way:
“When you’re growing..[….]..the biggest challenge is getting the founders to understand that the team is the product”.
Thankfully there’s been a huge amount of research into how to improve performance, motivation, and job satisfaction in teams and organisations. There’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all approach, but there are some simple things that you can do in a quick and cost-effective way make your team’s life a little bit more fun and efficient.
One such way is through having a team uniform. And in our case, team t-shirts.
MindMate show off their t-shirts (and general good vibes!)
Firstly, we’re not saying you should provide a compulsory uniform of daily t-shirts for your team. While that certainly is a good potential approach in some sectors (e.g. catering and hospitality), many types of team will prefer to save the t-shirts for optional wear, or for special occasions like team-building or conferences.
But whether it’s every day, or once a year, there’s plenty of evidence that a uniform or a great t-shirt can bond your team, make everyone feel more valued. And make them better at their job!
Introducing one of our favourite t-shirts. We call it the Premium t-shirt: the American Apparel 50/50, also known as BB401.
BEST FOR: Tech firms; Silicon Valley Startups; those who have a good budget and want to send a premium product to favourite customers, and those who want to sell only the finest merch.
The AA50/50 is a super stylish cut, feels incredibly soft to wear and screenprinting looks amazing on it.
Introducing one of our favourite bits of merch for t-shirt printing, what we call our Standard t-shirt: the Gildan Softstyle.
BEST FOR: All uses, from promotional giveaways to corporate uniforms to band merch. It looks like a premium product but at a great price.
This is a a really versatile choice for your garment printing. Why? It’s great value, stylish, feels great to wear and screen printing looks amazing on it.
It’s called Softstyle because it uses Gildan’s proprietary softstyle yarns. These yarns consume less energy to manufacture, producing less waste and result in a more stable print surface than traditional ring spun products (such as our budget t-shirts).
We’ve previously written about what high quality screen printing is (and why we have thousands of happy customers through using it), but there’s another type of printing that you may have heard of called Digital Printing (which is also known as Direct To Garment, or DTG).
At Ramp, we use screen printing to print your t-shirts. Why? Well, we think it’s the best, most tried and tested method. But let’s look at DTG too.
![Uniforms improve job satisfaction and efficiency [Research]](https://ramp.fm/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/workbold-white-on-black-Premium-Large-e1494427748159.jpg)
