Good Float Center T-Shirt Designs – DSP 248

What makes a good float center t-shirt? Is it about branding and being informative? Should it look cool or simple? Or does it have to do with comfort over design?

Graham and Ashkahn have some capital O Opinions about this so strap in and listen to them discuss all about the t-shirts they sell for Float On and the evolution of that process.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: All right. Welcome.

Ashkahn: Hey everybody.

Graham: To the daily solutions. The daily solutions. The daily.

Ashkahn: All right, that’s enough of that. This is Ashkahn.

Graham: I am Graham.

Ashkahn: And we answer questions every day here.

Graham: Including today. And that question for now is-

Ashkahn: For now?

Graham: For right now.

Ashkahn: It might change halfway through the episode?

Graham: No, I mean for now as in now is today.

Ashkahn: Oh, I see.

Graham: Now in the broader sense than this exact moment, you know?

Ashkahn: But not in too broad of a sense, to leak into tomorrow.

Graham: Exactly.

Ashkahn: I’m with you now.

Graham: All right. What do you mean by that?

“I’m working on a shirt design for my center and trying to find a balance between simple and informative. Will you describe your shirts and give your thoughts on shirt content?” Yes, we will.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Yeah. We can do that.

Graham: You sound a little dubious. You realize this is going to be the one question we don’t answer?

Ashkahn: Skip.

Graham: No, this is a tough-y.

Ashkahn: Well, this is one where I feel like we are-

Graham: Opinionated.

Ashkahn: Yes. And we don’t have-

Graham: And different.

Ashkahn: Exactly the same opinion as a lot of other people do. We’re on one end of a spectrum with I think these shirts.

Graham: We kind of do an “Emperor’s New Clothes” thing, and so people are in invisible float shirt that only appear to the pure of heart.

Ashkahn: If you really understand floating, you’ll see how beautiful these shirts are.

Graham: And that’s worked great.

Ashkahn: We charge a lot for them.

Graham: Yeah. Very little overhead to carry those, so that’s nice.

Ashkahn: So, there’s kind of a, I almost want to say a range of very abstract T-shirt design that doesn’t mention anything about floating or your floats center’s name or anything like that.

Graham: Yeah, like a weird diver popping out of kind of an octopus, tentacle-y thing, bubbles flying out.

Ashkahn: All the way too, I’ve just seen extremely utilitarian float shirts that are just like, “Name of float center. This is the float center.” And they have a little-

Graham: Actually, is it like business hours on it?

Ashkahn: I’ve never seen business hours. That’s-

Graham: Oh, yeah. Utilitarian, man.

Ashkahn: A small tablet with just so you can hit directions from wherever you are now to how to get to the float center

So you know, their website, maybe a catch-phrase, phone number, things that are just like-

Graham: Photographs of the owners.

Ashkahn: Photographs of us you know.

Graham: Really common actually to include me and Ashkahn on people’s float shirts.

Ashkahn: So that’s our recommendation. You should probably get that going.

Graham: I’ve heard there’s a huge ROI

Ashkahn: So yeah and you know somewhere in the middle is just your logo on a t-shirt.

Graham: Yeah and we now do have in fact T-shirts that have our logo on them. So that’s cool.

Ashkahn: It was a while. It took us many years to make those.

Graham: And before that we didn’t go the informative route. We went the crazy artistic design route that did not really outright mention anything about floating or Float On except on like a tiny little about like one inch long thing down by the bottom right hand side of the T-shirt.

Ashkahn: Right, just had a little-

Graham: Tiny little.

Ashkahn: That swoop logo.

Graham: Yah

Ashkahn: So our idea was very much like if we make cool enough T-shirts, the goal was to make a T-shirt cool enough that someone would see it and be like whoa, cool T-shirt. Where’d you get that?

Graham: What’s the deal?

Ashkahn: What is that about? And that would just be something that seeded conversations about float tanks about us Float On. The way we decided to go about doing that was not to rely on our own artistic skill because that didn’t seem like that was going to work.

So we ran a small T-shirt program. We had artists and we knew some artists from the artist program we had just run and literally just did a thing where we had like some people come in and float and had them create cool T-shirt designs out of floating and we released three different T-shirts all in that same style. Our logo was very small and just like the far bottom lip of the shirt on the side and other than that the rest of the shirt was like cool artwork that kind of was inspired by floating and seemed kind of floaty just in the very nature of what it was.

Graham: Which is awesome. I still really like that model for doing T-shirts.

Ashkahn: Yah.

Graham: And it does work very well. There are a couple of those T-shirts where almost every single time I wear them out, I get comments and I get to start that conversation. According to plan, like it actually succeeded in that mission, you know.

Ashkahn: So that’s really cool and it’s just like the shirt has a much more interesting story behind it too which I think is nice. Those shirts are pretty easy to sell because everyone likes a good T-shirt. And we also made high quality T-shirts too. I feel like that’s an important part of it because it’s really easy, again if you’re listening to this podcast because you want to hear our opinions, then that’s what you’re about to get. But I just feel like if you make a T-shirt and you just choose a really cheap T-shirt-

Graham: It says something about your brand too-

Ashkahn: No, it’s not even that-

Graham: What, what is it?

Ashkahn: I don’t like wearing those T-shirts. You know what I mean? If I have T-shirts like that and I searching through my wardrobe to decide what to wear for the day, I don’t choose those because they’re not comfortable and I don’t like wearing them. So what’s the point of that half measure? What’s the point of making a T-shirt even if you can sell it to some people, but it’s not really nice enough or comfortable enough for people to actually want to wear? You might as well take that extra step and really make it like a cool, nice T-shirt so that people do actually wear it around. To me, the cost saving just makes me feel like I basically did nothing. I didn’t really even make a T-shirt.

Graham: Yah, I totally agree. Even like when we went on a Float Tour we were giving away so many T-shirts as we traveled around we couldn’t afford to get the really nice ones for them and I don’t even wear our float T-shirts, like our Float Tour T-shirts as much as I wear other ones because they’re not as pleasant and also, I think it says something about your brand.

Ashkahn: Yah, I agree.

Graham: Just to kind of shut that down earlier and I wanted to come back to it. We’re in this business where we’re asking people to go into this state of relaxation, often when you get out, things feel different and you’re more aware of your tactile perception, your sense, your tastes and so to go from that to just sort of a generic rough T-shirt just doesn’t feel like what a float center should concentrate on. Nor do I see many doing it. I’d say the far majority of T-shirts that centers produce are actually really soft and they do have that tactile pleasure T-shirt.

Ashkahn: Which is really cool.

Graham: I don’t think I’m totally crazy, that’s all.

Ashkahn: No, no. I think that’s a part of everything. Everything you’re putting out in the world is a part of people’s experience with you, but I also think it’s useful to think about it from very practical point of view.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: At some point you’re saving money, but you’re not actually getting the intended effect of having people wearing your T-shirts.

Graham: Yah. Yah, yah. We think it’s good. Invest in soft T-shirts. Material almost more than design, I think is actually one of the really important things.

Ashkahn: Yah, people often, that’s a big factor in how they choose what they’re gonna wear. At least for me.

Graham: And we started making logo T-shirts specifically because we had customers requesting it.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: They were like, hey these T-shirts are really cool but I kinda just want a rep Float On around and we had specifically avoided it because we didn’t want to be one of those people that just tries to use our customers as walking billboards, but-

Ashkahn: Right, we fought if for a while, it was years before we actually made them.

Graham: And it turns out, people just loved our business and they did want to rep us around and they were kind of proud of coming to float at Float On and far from feeling like we were taking advantage of them or turning them into billboards. They were requesting that they have something that they could wear with our logo. I think we were kind of a little too opinionated there in our own heads at some point. Another good thing about actually listening to your customers is you get to change the stupid assumptions that you made early on.

Ashkahn: We still kept it classy. It doesn’t say anything else. It’s just a nice kind of, relatively small clean version of our logo on the front of the shirt. That’s it.

Graham: And still soft material and everything like that.

Ashkahn: What’s funny is that our employees wear it around a lot when they’re working the shop too because we also don’t have any uniforms or require any sort of wearing a certain thing when our employees come into work, they’ve naturally just started to wear Float On T-shirts as they’re working their shifts.

Graham: I know, it’s really funny. That cracks me up too when I go into the shop and everyone is wearing Float On T-shirts and has their matching kind of aprons that they wear and I’m like we didn’t require any of this.

Ashkahn: I will say too, we have a lot of float T-shirts. We went on a Float Tour and people gave us shirts everywhere we went.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: Which was awesome. I will wear shirts that have a lot more descriptive information on them and just like a cool design or logo and those do generate a lot of conversation too. I won’t say those are like not effective or anything like that. The same thing will happen when I’m wearing that where people are like: “Floating, what is that? Is that” Especially if someone’s heard about it a little bit. Like having a T-shirt, that very explicitly is about float tanks is often enough to spark a conversation or make people interested in wanting to ask you and talk to you about it.

Graham: That is true. I find the same thing. Although my instinct for making float on T-shirts is not to go that informational route. I totally wear around other float senders T-shirts that are in that thing and you’re right, it does actually help people comment on them or I have people comment on them when I go out. There’s probably not a right way or wrong way to do this.

I will say getting an actual designer to help you through the process, making sure that your T-shirt image is in a vector format.

Ashkahn: Right, you know colors-

Graham: It’s good for printing that you understand whether you want to do like a single pass or a double pass with the screen. There’s a bunch of little details where if you haven’t gotten into screen printing or T-shirt making beforehand that you should just find someone to kind of hold your hand through the process and definitely find someone who feels comfortable enough with design that they can produce this vector image for you. Not just you kind of drawing it out in Photoshop or something like that.

And have fun.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Don’t be afraid to change it up. It costs a little bit to make new screens when you’re printing T-shirts, but changing your T-shirt design is not even the hardest thing in the world.

Ashkahn: Yeah, for sure. And it’s one of the nice things where options can be nice for people. You know, we had three different designs running simultaneously and people had fun looking through them and seeing. Then we also printed those designs on multiple color schemes sometimes, so we had almost like six varieties of T-shirts to choose from and we had like a little T-shirt station and it was cool. People kind of liked looking through it and seeing the one that matches their style.

And there’s something nice about options, I think, so that because people just don’t like wearing clothes that everybody else is wearing. And you know you like feeling like you have some kind of unique clothing choices. It’s one of the few places I’ll actually recommend more choices than less.

Graham: And I will say there’s a limit to that, which is for most products, if you decide to carry miracle fruit, for example. You end up carrying a single pill size and a box size. And that’s really all you have to stock. And if you carry T-shirts, all of a sudden you have to have men’s and women’s-

Ashkahn: Oh yah, it’s a huge headache-

Graham: You’re carrying extra small through extra extra extra large. You need to know the kind of distribution of what sizes people are going to order. If you want it always on hand, you need to actually inventory all of those and make sure you’re ready to make another order of shirts when you’re only out of certain sizes like the complications that come along with clothing is really intense.

Ashkahn: It takes up a lot of space to display them too.

Graham: Yah, I mean if we were doing more than three designs, I don’t think we could have managed it, just in the huge variety of sizes we’d have to carry, making sure we’re stocking them. It gets just really intense. So do be aware of that. It’s one of the more complicated retail items to carry and to keep in stock.

Ashkahn: Yah and it’s a lot of money up front because you’ve got to buy all that stuff. All the different sizes and enough of each and stuff like that.

Graham: Yah, okay, good question-

Ashkahn: Yah, send us a picture of your T-shirt if you think you have a cool one. I always like to see them.

Graham: Yah and then we’ll describe it over the airwaves.

Ashkahn: You have a bubbly thing going on.

Graham: Alright so if you have more questions, go over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.

Ashkahn: That’s right and we will talk to you guys tomorrow. Bye everyone.

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