Greater>Than Clothing

This is the first in a series of posts on the broad topic of “sustainability”.

From the beginning, I have thought of Greater>Than as a kind of laboratory. I’m interested in different ideas about how to structure a business, but I have never been in a position to implement them myself. Further, it seems unlikely that I will ever have license to be truly radical within the context of my day job.

As in most larger companies, greater responsibility seems to coincide with increasing conservatism. I’m not sure which side is causal, but they are definitely directly correlated. So, Greater>Than is a chance for us to try things out, and while it isn’t exactly risk-free since we have invested some significant effort into the project, it isn’t the basis of our livelihoods (at least not yet).

photo credit: shearforce

One of the most buzzed-about concepts in business today is sustainability. When oil companies are making commercials touting their environmental sensitivity, I think we can safely say the concept has reached a critical mass. Consumers are leading the charge. As the general public becomes more convinced of threats such as global warning, they start looking for ways to mitigate their contribution to the problem. More and more, consumers will choose “greener” products if given an opportunity.

Many companies have responded by flooding the marketplace with products that claim to be less harmful to produce, use or dispose of than their predecessors. While greater attention on the issue is a positive development on the whole, there are to my mind at least two major flaws with these early efforts to consume more sustainably.

First, given the American tendency to use “what we buy” as a proxy for “how we live” and even “who we are”, we may have found ourselves a path to getting the small things “right” at the expense of the larger picture. There is a peculiar symbiosis between American consumers and the products that we buy that allows us to construct our public and private personas in part through the products we choose. The ramifications of this relationship are far-reaching, but it’s most germane to this topic in that it explains why adjusting our consumer choices is the most efficient way to start to feel like we’re making a difference. Buy some recycled paper towels, some natural detergent, maybe even a Prius, and you become a full-fledged eco-warrior.

You might even begin to look down on people who haven’t made the same efforts that you have (here, as in many, many other areas, South Park provides the sharpest satire, showing us that despite reducing smog the Prius leads to dangerous levels of smug). My point here is not simply to point out that some people are a bit hypocritical in their greenness (I’m not free from guilt here myself), but to suggest that real change may require asking tougher questions of ourselves than whether we are willing to switch to CF bulbs. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine that a few years from now we’ll look back on our attempts to buy our way out of this mess and realize how stunningly hubristic it all was. We might even find that “sustainable consumption” is an oxymoron. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, Joey and I had a ‘planned’ meeting. I say planned because many times if Joey and I are hanging out, the conversation can just turn towards G>T. However, this time it was on our calendars…and that meant I would be taking notes…which means it’s business time.

We decided to meet in Ballard at the Old Town Ale House. We found a parking spot just down the street from our meeting destination and noticed a sandwich board on the sidewalk for Raw Threads. We decided to check it out and I’m glad we did. It’s a small boutique filled with unique and (for the most part) locally designed clothing. It was good to see a newer shop like that in Ballard. I’m sure there are many more like it that would be a good fit for Greater>Than apparel. To me, the visit to Raw set the stage nicely for us to proceed with our meeting.

Old Town Ale House is a clean, older place with good drafts, plenty of open tables, pretty good food and it’s apparently awesome for Greater>Than meetings. I started to jump right in and express my need for an online idea sharing space and it hit me. I had been eager to pay homage to the great (and fictional) Murray Hewitt, band manager for Flight of the Conchords and a Deputy Cultural Attaché at the New Zealand Consulate. If you have not seen Flight of the Conchords on HBO, please do so. See, Murray does not believe that ANY meeting can officially begin until role is taken. So we stopped everything and took role. Joey…present. Ryan…present.

Murray takes taking role very seriously. 

Now we can get down to business. The goals (for me) going into the meeting were simply to find out where we were financially and set some timeframes for completing certain critical tasks. From this, Joey had a great idea of creating a list of steps to complete in order to go from where we are ‘today’ to actually printing our first shirt. Ideally, we will create a list of tasks with important details about each task such as time dependancy, resources needed and essentially who will own it.

The hope is that we will be able to target and schedule larger more difficult objectives while identifying the smaller items that we can complete at anytime. The list will let us know exactly what we can do to move the project forward at any given moment.

It’s business time. 

Work on this infamous list will start immediately and we hope to share some of the tasks with you as well as the progress we make as we tackle them. We’re making progress and having this meeting was a big part of keeping the momentum going. Look for future posts with more details of the list and the actions we are taking to make the list a bit shorter.
Thanks for checking in!

Hey there. Let me be the second to welcome you to the new, improved Greater>Than Clothing blog, complete with actual blog posts! As Ryan mentioned previously, we are both going to be posting more frequently from now on. For me, this is partially going to be an exercise in stopping myself from over-thinking things, which does not exactly come naturally to me.

My strategy will be simple, however: I’m going to do stuff so that I have stuff to write about. The daily struggle to move this little enterprise forward an inch at a time should provide plenty of blog fodder, and I think we are finally in a place where we can really concentrate on the business. I’m pretty pumped.

So, in that vein, I have an announcement: we are temporarily suspending e-mail newsletter sign-up. I know it’s disappointing, but calm down; it’s going to be OK. At some point in the future, e-mail newsletter sign-up will be back. Every reputable e-commerce company has an e-mail marketing program, so it’s something we’ll have to do sooner or later.

For now, though, it’s coming down for two main reasons. First, honestly, I kind of jumped the gun when I put the sign-up widget on the site, seeing as how we don’t yet have any products to market. I read about this great free e-mail marketing service and I signed right up. We did not, in fact, find an occasion to send a single newsletter. Lesson learned: add features to the site only if they are likely to provide a near-ish term benefit.

Second, it has basically been all downhill for that service provider I was so excited about, Zookoda. First, they were purchased by an at-best-controversial company, IZEA (Michael Arrington is not a fan). After this TechCrunch post putting them on deadpool watch, I figured it was time to pull the plug. Lesson learned: even startups with well-reviewed, working products can turn on a dime. It’s good to have a backup plan. We got away with this one mostly due to the fact that we don’t yet rely on an e-mail program.

Which brings me to the e-mail sign-up post-mortem. I have to say, for something that I just slapped up on the site, we didn’t do too badly. Of the five people who signed up, four of them weren’t me, and one of them was someone I don’t personally know. I salute you all, but especially the unnammed t-shirt enthusiast with a hawaii.edu e-mail address. If you send me an e-mail, I’ll put you on a super-secret discount list that I just made up right now.

So I have been getting back into the forums over at T-Shirt Forums and I keep hearing these screen printers talk about this one book as the ‘must-have’ for any screen printer.

So I started to search for the book and it has proved to be quite elusive. The book in question is called How to Print T-Shirts for Fun and Profit by Scott and Pat Fresener. Admittedly I was turned off by the name. To me it sounded a little cheesy. However, these guys (and gals) on the forums swear by it’s extremely technical and user-friendly information. All sounds good, until you try to purchase it. I can’t find this thing anywhere. The closest I have come to finding it was on Amazon.com and the list price is $39.95, yet someone is selling it used for $135.00…all for a outdated edition. No thanks.

I think the trouble is going to be getting the latest edition of the book (there are 12 editions with the latest in 2005). So if any of you have favorite book stores that you frequent, please keep your eyes open for us!

Some of our loyal readers have complimented our new header images. Thanks for the kind words. I’m happy with the way they look, too. The previous header came with the blog theme (which is called Freshy), and I’m glad to have put more of a personal stamp on it.

You may also have noticed that the header isn’t always the same when you visit. I got the randomization script from Photo Matt, which is the blog written by Matthew Mullenweg, who is the founding developer of Wordpress, which is the self-publishing software running this site and many thousands of others. You may have to hold shift when you hit refresh in Firefox to get a new picture to show up (Firefox caches pages). If you’re not using Firefox, you should be!

I took each of the pictures currently featured*, some of them on a recent trip to Chicago. Here’s another:

In the open spirit of this project, I’d love to put some pics from the community up there. So send in your 780 x 95px jpegs!

While I’m in the middle of this navel gazing meta-post, I’d like to give a shout-out to the creator of the forums plugin that allowed me to launch the forum feature on this site in a single day, Andy Staines. I had a slight problem with the installation, which I posted to his forum, and he figured it out for me personally. He provided amazing support for his (free!) software. Andy, you rock.

*Update: Ryan has added some of his pictures to the mix, from his trip to Hawaii. The gorgeous sunset and the sea urchin shot are his. We want you to get credit for your images if you send them in, so be sure to mark them as yours in some way before sending.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of community forums on Greater>Than Clothing!

This is another incremental step toward our goal of creating a seamless, one-stop site where members of our community can talk to us and to each other. I invite you to check them out and let us know what you think. I’m particularly interested in any comments you might have about the forum’s structure. Are there sections you’d like us to add?

Let’s see some chatter out there!

I’ve been spending a lot of space in this blog talking about theory, and while that is certainly part of the plan, another key goal is to chronicle how we get this company truly up and running. So, it’s time to check in from an operations/development perspective.

A while back, Ryan and I sat down and worked out a draft budget for phase one of the project. Essentially we were trying to figure out how much cash we would need to design, print and sell our first 300 shirts*. The good news was that we both felt the assumptions were reasonable, and having a budget made the whole enterprise seem more substantial. At our day jobs, the motivation comes from outside, but with Greater>Than we have to find ways to keep ourselves motivated. Simply having a plan goes a long way, even (maybe especially) when it illuminates the obstacles in our path. In this case, that’s exactly what it did, as we simply didn’t have the money our budget called for. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m an Atlantic reader and an unabashed word-nerd, so naturally one of my favorite features is the Word Fugitives column by Barbara Wallraff, (who wrote a book of the same name). Readers write in with requests for words to express particular situations or feelings, and other readers try to coin terms to fit the bill. Wallraff sifts through the results then writes her column, highlighting representative and outstanding examples. It’s fun collective nerdery and there are usually one or two gems.

In the most recent issue, answers to the following prompt are given:

“that happy feeling of kinship one feels for the driver of a car of the same make and model as one’s own”

My favorite answers included carma, carcissism, carmraderie and autobond. I told you I was a word-nerd.

Two Greater>Than-related things caught my attention while I was reading this month’s column:

I realized that Word Fugitives is just like Greater>Than

In fact, it’s an almost perfect illustration of the “curated crowdsourcing” model we use. The editor sets the rules of the game, a community member provides a prompt to focus the creativity of the group, solutions are submitted, the editor sifts through the submissions, then publishes the results back to the group. So simple!

Over time, the community becomes self-defining; the tone and quality of the output determined, is maintained and evolves over time through the collective efforts of the community. Think of an Ouija board. Nobody is “controlling” it, but everyone has a hand in determining direction. To put it another way, it is controlled by everyone and no one (no “one”).

One submission in particular blew me away Read the rest of this entry »

When I first became obsessed with the idea of Greater>Than screen-printing its own shirts, I knew that there was some significant equipment involved. I had an idea of what was needed but perhaps not the specifics of each piece of equipment.

Research was required…off to the Internet! I first came across some start-up packages of screen-printing equipment and I was getting pretty excited about some of the prices. It looked like there were some pretty good deals out there. I thought for sure we would find a great package solution.
 
Then I seemed to hit a wall. My searches started to yield the same results and I felt like I wasn’t getting what I needed (I think screen printing equipment manufacturers need a lesson in SEO ). I knew there was so much more out there that I hadn’t tapped into yet.

I had been sharing bits and pieces of info as I gathered them with Joey and he mentioned a great online forum I should check out called T-Shirt Forums (how obvious ). Upon checking out the site, I quickly searched the “Screen Printing” section to see if others had opinions on printing equipment. Sure enough, there was a plethora of great insight on multiple aspects of many types of printing equipment.

Most of the questions I had (and many that I didn’t) were already discussed and I eagerly read post after post absorbing all kinds of nuggets. Perhaps the best bit of info was some reviews of the exact equipment from the previously mentioned online start-up packages. Low and behold the deals were too good to be true.
Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to welcoming Ryan to the Greater>Than team, I wanted to follow up on the change in strategy he described in his intro post. My original plan was for Greater>Than to play a design consulting/curation role, working with designers to help them achieve their visions and selecting the most promising designs for production. We would then contract with another company to get our shirts made.

This had proven a bit frustrating, especially since the company I had chosen to work with was in another state, and we were conducting all of our business through e-mail. Plus, we don’t want to compromise at all on quality, and I felt like there was an element of risk involved there, since the quality of the print itself (a crucial component in overall quality) would be out of our hands.

While I was trying to force my way through the frustration, Ryan saw this problem as an opportunity, deftly demonstrating one of the key operating principles that I had set out for the company (but had failed to live up to myself): use problems to identify opportunities. This principle of ‘probletunity*’ is a reminder to bring creativity to bear on issues that hold us back, so that they can be not only overcome but transcended. Read the rest of this entry »