Woops

I wonder how many people actually noticed that under my "30 shirts in 30 days" post I had a cute picture of a bunch of shirts. How many shirts? 29 of them! Not 30. So since I'm a little slow on the uptake at times, I only noticed that this afternoon. Figured out which shirt was missing, and hey, it's this one. Carry on then.

Giant Astronaut Invasion by Steven Charles Schmidt on a S black t-shirt. Printed October 2010.
This is a discharge and process color print on a bleached t-shirt. The print has been stressed by bleach as well, so is deliberately faded. Shirt by Alstyle Apparel.
Click image for more information. Click here to buy this shirt.

30 shirts, 30 days

Never one to resist the opportunity to continuously muck things up, I`ve decided to change how things work on the site again. I was starting to find it a bit unwieldy having a larger number of shirts on the site and was a little overwhelmed at the prospect of adding another 74 that I just completed. I thought it might be cool to try something where every 30 days I put up 30 completely random shirts, and only make them available for that month. That way I would be able to easily keep track of them and there would always be something different up every month. And so I present to you: 30 shirts, 30 days. 28 of these are completely new and have never been on this site before! I trust you will find something to ogle:



That first number might go up and that second number might go down as we go on with the year, it`s up to you really.
I`ve made a few other li`l changes to things around here. For starters, we are back to regular ol` prices on shirts- the whole "pay what you want" idea didn`t exactly pan out. The good news is, the prices are lower than before. I`ve also added a non-Flash gallery option to the store, since I was getting some very rare comments from some people saying that the Flash galleries weren`t loading for them, and for others that find they load a little slower at times.

Ummm....happy festive holidays to everyone and all that jazz, I`ll be taking a slow train to New Brunswick for the break and hoping and believing in better times, straight ahead for 2011. Great expectations to all you and yours.

Taking Care of the Cats black t-shirt

Taking Care of the Cats by James Kirkpatrick on a black t-shirt. Also available in camel brown and red. Printed April 2010.
Shirt by Alstyle Apparel.
Click image for more information. Click here to bid on this shirt.

Spycke S royal v-neck tank top

Spycke by Vallois Loic on a S royal v-neck tank top. Printed July 2010. Sewn by Mary Hoopey, October 2010.

Click image for more information. Click here to bid on this shirt.

Food Chain M white cap sleeve raglan

Food Chain by Thom Larsen on a M whiteblack cap sleeve raglan. Printed August 2010.

Click image for more information. Click here to bid on this shirt.

1984 XL white ladies' t-shirt

1984 by Robin Antiga on a XL white ladie's t-shirt. Printed February 2007.
Shirt by American Apparel.
Click image for more information. Click here to bid on this shirt.

No Wrath Medium pink cap sleeve raglan

No Wrath by Thom Phoenix on a M pink cap sleeve raglan. Printed August 2010.

Click image for more information. Click here to bid on this shirt.

Thanks, "instablog"!

A Boatload of Trouble

Happy Tuesday, one and all. I just posted about 30 new shirts to the database, so there should be a whole lot more eye candy for you to trip through today. I was going to release them slowly, one per day, but a little faerie told me I should just go ahead and put 'em all up at once.









So instead of making you wait for a new shirt every day, I just thought I'd make them all available at once, and then annoy you to death by blogging about a different shirt every day. And now, thanks to my all-new superconvenient instablog (patent pending), I'll be able to do that in under a minute. And you can too. With one click just highlight the instablog text, a quick ctrl-c and you have an instant blog post complete with picture, information and links. It certainly appeals to my inner lazy bastard, so I thought it might yours as well. As a matter of fact, I'm going to give it a try this afternoon. After I've had my 3 hour nap of course.........

New shirt: Amilia on a yellow/orange v-neck

Amilia on a yellow/orange v-neck

Sewn by Mary Hoopey in October 2010. Size medium- chest 34", height 24". This is a one of a kind item. Click images to see more.

Pay What Thou Wilt

When I re-launched this web site last week, I had a hard time deciding how to set the prices. The shirts, particularly the new ladies' shirts, are expensive and time-consuming to produce. Many of them take well over an hour to create. So it's a tough call. I have already heard from people who say the prices were too high, and others telling me I should be charging more. I was thinking about this the other night when I thought: Hmmm. Why have any prices at all?

Of course, I'm not talking about giving away my shirts, though certainly if I were a billionaire I probably would consider something of the sort. I'm talking about you, the customer, telling me how much you're willing to pay for them. In short, pay what thou wilt.

This, as some of you probably know, is not an entirely new idea: Radiohead did it last year with their "In Rainbows" album, allowing people to pay what they wanted for it. But what I have set up is not quite the same: I'm not letting my shirts go for a song. I want you to write to me and tell me how much you're willing to pay for the shirt you want, and then I will decide whether or not to sell it to you for that price. If not, I will write you back, and you can make a counter offer if you like. If I do decide it's a fair offer, I will send you payment instructions and the shirt is yours.

You may be thinking that you'll probably just get outbid. Well, that may be the case, but not neccesarily. I'm willing to consider barter. I'm willing to trade services or artwork for shirts. And I'm even willing to sell you that shirt for less than someone else's bid if you can make a compelling enough argument about why you need it. In short, consider Zero Boutique a kind of online Middle Eastern bazaar. Haggling is not only permitted, it's encouraged.

I'm not sure how long this experiment will last. If it's a success, I will keep it like this. If not, I'll go back to setting prices on things. But I am willing to give it a try. So I'm hoping you are too.

Next by Slawek Kosolka on a dyed ladies' t-shirt

Originally uploaded by zeebeekyoo.

Next by Slawek Kosolka on a dyed small white ladies' t-shirt, dyed blue. Shirt is by American Apparel. Chest 30", Height 25". This is a one of a kind item! It will be reprinted but not in these colors.

Click here to purchase for $32.00

So I've had a bit of feedback about the new gui, and while many people like the look of it, some have told me that the Flash galleries tend to load somewhat slowly and it's frustrating having to click through every shirt. So 2 things I'm going to do: first, have a non-Flash option, and secondly, make a page where you can get a quick look at all the currently available shirts in one place. That should ease the strain for some of you with slower connections/less time to wait.

I've got a lot of shirts to put up yet, which I hope to start doing very soon, and there are a ton in production right now. All told, there should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 new shirts by the new year. Just trying to streamline everything at this point: it's a long process, especially the numbering and cataloging of each shirt.

Well, happy Sunday. News at eleven.

Spiral Stairs on a Red/Yellow Cap Sleeved Raglan

front2 (4), originally uploaded by zeebeekyoo.

Spiral Stairs on a medium red/yellow capsleeved raglan.
Flickr Gallery

Yety tan/brown cap sleeved raglan

front2 (4), originally uploaded by zeebeekyoo.

Yety by Vallois Loic on a M tan/brown cap sleeved raglan.
Click here for Flickr Gallery.

"What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been"

So yeah. A year. Actually, over a year. Since I last put anything on this web site, that is. Well, I could give you a song and dance about why Zero Boutique has been in limbo for such a long time, but the long and the short of it is this: I basically lost interest in running a t-shirt company. Pretty much. Oh, I didn't lose interest in printing or designing or working with amazing talented artists or screen printing, I didn't stop having more ideas than I knew what to do with, I didn't even stop liking t-shirts (in fact I'm still quite fond of them). I did, however, lose interest in being one of thousands of t-shirt companies out there all basically doing the exact same thing, in a kind of race to the bottom. I was feeling lost in a sea of sameness, and I knew Zero Boutique didn't fit into that world, and that it was destined for more than that.

The answer, I decided a couple of years ago, was to actually move in the direction of following an even older dream, a dream I had abandoned in my younger years as impractical: that of making my own clothing. But not just a bit of cut and sew. I really wanted to do it with much bigger prints, using lots of different, softer inks and techniques than I was used to. Once I got my print shop moved out into my garage last year, I started slowly moving in that direction. It took a long time to build up some new skills and acquire the different machinery and materials I would need in order to do the things I wanted to do, and that's still an ongoing (probably endless) process. But I feel like I've finally reached the first of hopefully many more stages towards bringing the clothing I see in my mind to life. And that's exciting.

These 21 shirts I have posted today represent the first results of these early experiments. I hope you like them as much as I do. Not only are the styles new, much of the art is new as well. There's a new piece from our old friend James Kirkpatrick (Thesis). 2 new amazing pieces from a French artist named Vallois Loic. Tons of eye candy from resident screwball Thom Phoenix. A classic collage piece by Steven Charles Schmidt. And a lot more! I'm also very excited because with these new shirts I have implemented another old dream: the individual numbering of each and every shirt, with permanent serial codes printed under the collar on the inside. Each Zero Boutique shirt will henceforth be much like a numbered print, with its production information traceable online.*

So it might be hard to tell, but I'm pretty amped up right about now. This is the beginning of a new day for Zero Boutique. There are already many more shirts where these came from, and I will be posting more in the days and weeks ahead. I would like to acknowledge Mary Hoopey, the seamstress who put these shirts together for me, for her amazing talent and skill. She is incredible and I hope to work with her for many years to come.

For now, please enjoy the show. I will post some pics soon. Cheerio!

*not live yet, but will be soon

zbq m.i.a.?

hello peoples of earth. i realize it has been many, many moons since i last made any contact with the outside world, at least through this site. i know some of you are still out there, because i get a handful of new twitter followers every month, and there are some signs of life (someone bought a shirt today!) so i just thought maybe i should say hello, not dead, and haven't forgotten about the ZB. in fact, far from it. i am busy at work on some very big ideas, ideas which have taken a long time to incubate due to the fact that i am trying a lot of different techniques, ink and equipment i've never used before. i have printed some stuff already, but i've always been a fan of the big splash, so i'm holding out until i can do it right and proper. this may actually take another month or 2, maybe even 3. but i'll try to start posting in here a bit more to give you some tantalizing morsels that will hopefully whet your appetite for what's to come. you can actually see some of these morsels if you join the ZBQ Fan Club on facebook. for now, my laptop battery is about to die, so i will bid you adieu. au prochaine.......