Ten years of tees

It all started with the simple question: “How many t-shirts do you really have?”
I felt both embaressed and baffled myself, I had no idea. I knew that I had at least 30 black tees, since that is how many that fit on on my clothes hanger. Note, to keep the black tees black I was them seperately to keep them black. Black is the second most difficult colour to keep nice. The worst of them all is white, that’s why white is the most rare caolour in my collection.

How has this journey gone for the since I last wrote a longer text. Well, I kept on buying tees. But the influx of new tees went down about 3 years ago, when the Swedish customs decided to stop all shipments from outside EU and charge crazy fees on everything. Before that only larger orders of about 50$ got stuck. This was not due to shipments sent from US but instead it was crazy cheap goods sent from China with no fees paid in advance. Since Sweden don’t want to single out China everybody should be punished. This means that I is maily ordering from EU sites as OtherTees and Qwertees.

Still people ask me how many tees I have, and then I usually tell them about my site and recently I created a Instagram account @henrikfakir_tees. I started it during the autumn and not all tees is there, since Tee 875 I post almost all there as well. But here is still the complete. If you click on a post and scroll down to find the “Search” field you could try diffferent themes to search for. All tees have tags like: Simpsons, Star Wars, spaghetti, Cookie Monster etc. Also all tees have a cathegory, i.e. from which store I bought the tees, which is also searchable.

I thing that I did not put too much thought into when I started was the creator and the creator’s title of the tee. One problem with this is that sometimes it takes quite long time before I wear the tees for the first time and post it here. Then i have to figure out where I bought it and/or who made it. As an example, Tee 894, was bought at least 5 years ago. It had got tucked away in my closet among other used tees. It took some picture googling and mail excavations to unearth the correct title. Luckily I was familiar with this artist’s style, the great Italian designer, NemiMakeIt. 🙂

But not all is fun and games. Sometimes you will find more serious prints with a message to you all. If you don’t like the them you could F off. I’ll stand by the Kurdish people’s fight against the fascist Turkish government. Also all people’s right to say what they want, you don’t have to agre with them. For this right they should also accept to be criticized for what they without being angry. Offended is ok to be but not violent or refusing to be criticized.

So now that 10 years has passed, I’ve made a special Tee, SpreadShirt is still the best and quickest self-making tee store, and should actually would have been worn on February 5th, but since that was a Sunday, the celebration was delayed to the 6th instead. I had brag about it, on work at least. It is the 900th tee. It would have been nice if it could have been tee number 1000, but 900 is equally an even number.

Some statistics:
The first year it was 365 tees, one tee a day. Then there have been 535 additional tees. That is approx 60 new tees every year. And when you look at that tiny number, that’s nothing, but if you look at it as more then 1 new tee every week, then it sounds somewhat crazy.
The crazy look is something that I always get when I tell how many tees I have. Directly after that they ask: where do you store/keep all the shirts? I answer that I’ve archived some in my basement storage and that apply the Sheldon Cooper (from Big Bang Theory) folding technique, which means that thery are very neatly folded and you are able to store many, many, many tees on the shelves in a walk-in-closet.

So many thanks to the few that have managed to find this blog and actually read it. The Instagram account is a vain attempt to attract some more interest.

We will see if I’m still here after an additional 10 years. I hope not, but in some way or another I’ll still wear new tees with funny prints.

Todelou