6 February 2008, 11:10 am
By now, you’ve probably seen Giants Super Bowl XLII Champions shirts. The Giants had their parade yesterday in New York and unless I’m the only one on the mailing lists of places like Champs, Eastbay, Dick's, etc. you probably got an email trying to sell you one. You’ve probably wondered where all the shirts come from. If I had to guess, you probably think they come from a third world country where people get pennies on the dollar to hand draw each shirt in 30 seconds. The good news is that’s not actually the case. Now, I am not a higher up in Nike, Reebok, or Adidas so I can’t tell you where all the shirts come from. But I can tell you some good news. Lots of those shirts come from right here in America. The company I work for, Progressive Design Apparel here in Indianapolis, not only does promotional products but also screen printing and embroidery. We do custom work, where you come in tell us about your needs and design apparel that meets your needs and contract work, where a company sends us product (shirts, hats, jackets, anything) and we either put their artwork on the product or we create the artwork and put it on the customer supplied apparel. Some companies do only one or the other kind of work, but we do both. One is only better than the other depending on a business’ goals. Anyway, back to the Super Bowl shirts. As I said, many are produced by normal Americans like you and I. Actually, as a point of specification, the manufacturing of a t-shirt is usually not done in place like Indianapolis, rather the decorating. So the blanks may be made in Honduras, for example, but printing them with a Giants Super Bowl XLII Champs design is done here Indianapolis. At PDA (Progressive Design Apparel), the guys who print shirts are Dave and Jonathan (you can see the whole team here). So last week a truck-load of shirts were shipped into PDA and on Friday after the last job was done, the Super Bowl shirt screens were set up. (I’ll explain screens another day.) On Sunday after the game—which ended about 10:15 p.m. Indianapolis time—the crew came in and setup the Giants on the press. They put the first shirt on and let it rip. Our shirt capacity is around 1,000 shirts an hour, so assuming at that time of night there’s no loss of efficiency you can easily figure out how long it took for our guys to pump out the 3,000 shirts we did. Aside: That’s actually a smaller number than in previous years, because for example last year when the Colts won, there was a greater need for shirts in the immediate Indianapolis area. With the teams being in New Jersey and Massachusetts, clearly demand isn’t as high if it’s a Super Bowl win by a team within a few hundred miles of here—which is actually a large number since Indianapolis is located within an 8 hour drive of roughly half the U.S. population. I didn’t get a chance to ask because everyone who came in on Sunday night got Monday off and yesterday they were back to working hard, but they probably didn’t get home until 1:30-2 a.m. There you go: most Super Bowl shirts come from normal, everyday guys right here in (as Ned Flanders would say), “that space between New York and L.A. called ‘America.’” Actually we do more than just Super Bowl shirts; I remember seeing at least 3 of the NFL playoff teams getting printed here, plus I know I’ve seen a handful of NBA shirts done in the past few months. Who’s your favorite team? You may be wearing one of our shirts.... read more
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