Birth of a T-Shirt

The End Product

The creation of a t-shirt is a simple way to illustrate the design process within a company.  The picture above is of the finished product hanging in the shop, ready for the consumer to come in and take home (to cherish forever!).

At the start of every season – 4 times a year (Spring, Summer, Fall, and Holiday), the design team comes up with a theme, which is basically the concept from which designers, sales people and such work around to keep the group of product clear and concise.

Initial Idea Collage

The first step is to start finding imagery that can “paint the picture”. In this way, everyone has a visual of the mood (thought process) and a general idea of some aesthetics. The above collage begins to illustrate the season’s theme, which in this example was Northern China/Kathmandu.

Seasonal Theme “Newsletter”

Then comes the story (one of my favorite parts of this whole thing). Kind of like a short story, with imaginary characters and circumstances. This ends up being a tool from which the sales teams can further explain the theme and concept behind the collection to their clients.

Designers begin drawing up their ideas and “fleshing out” the concept. It’s understood from the beginning that not all designs will make it to actual production, so a healthy weeding out process of elimination takes place for the first few weeks. This process is identical for all categories of clothing- sweaters, outerwear, denim jeans, etc…

Final Sketch

The above design eventually made it through the editing process and was then submitted to the factory for the production of sales samples- literally samples for the sales teams. From this point, the designers finish the technical sketches and send all the information off to the factory which will handle production for the garments. The factory then produces the quantities of t-shirts ordered by the sales teams.

Factory Screening Floor

Above is a typical t-shirt screening factory where thousands of T’s are produced every week. The particular t-shirt we are discussing here was made just outside Istanbul, Turkey.  The T’s are then packed and shipped out to retail locations around the world.

Voila, just like magic!

Author: Andrew Payne