Shirt of the day: Spireal Stares XL baseball shirt!

Welcome to a new feature on the site- the shirt of the day. We just finished a new batch of shirts last week, and just before we posted them all up online, we thought that it might be nice to instead just release one shirt every day. Kind of keep you in suspense a little more, and make things a little more interesting. So presenting today's shirt of the day: Spireal Stares on a blue baseball shirt.

     You asked us for bigger shirts, and we listened- this is the biggest custom sewn shirt we have done yet. 44 inch chest and 28 inch height, or approximately equivalent to a men's XL. Click the image to go to our Etsy store and get a closer look! And keep checking back- we've got over 30 new shirts to post, so there will be something new going up every day in August, and hopefully by the time we get to the end of this batch there will be even more new shirts waiting in the wings. Love is the drug!

Etsy-riffic!

Building a web site is very time consuming. Maintaining said web site takes up even more time and energy. And if you are talking about an online store, it can be nearly a full time job. Preparing all of the graphics and product information, entering all of that information into a database and uploading files, not to mention testing it all to make sure it's working properly- that all takes a lot of dedication. And while I do truly enjoy working on this site, it's not what I want to spend all of my time doing. I am a "hands-on" type and would rather put more time into making things.

Enter Etsy. If you are not familiar with Etsy, I'm not sure where you've been hiding, but it is home to thousands of items made by people from all over the world. The volume of stuff- and good stuff too, not crap- is quite impressive. One can easily enter Etsy world and not come out for a very long time- it's pretty dang cool. I had put a few items on Etsy several years ago and was a little discouraged when they didn't get much notice. But I always thought it might be a good idea to try putting more up there and maybe put some time and effort into trying to get more people to check it out. So I logged in for the first time in probably 3 years and decided to post a few shirts.

Since I had last logged on, Etsy vastly improved their user interface. Right away, I was very impressed by how quickly I was able to get products up online. In about a minute I was able to get my first listing up, and the others went even faster as I was able to use a custom template. In no time at all I had posted 20 products, and it didn't take me long to realize how much easier and quicker this was by doing it through my own custom built online store.

Once I realized how affordable the listing fees were, it took me about a nanosecond to jump to my next conclusion: I would, as an experiment, put my entire inventory on Etsy, and take down my online store. And well, that's what I've done. It is an experiment, but it is one that seems to be working out well. By being a part of the Etsy community I'm able to catch the attention of people who likely would never have heard of ZBQ otherwise. And the time I save I can put into doing things I like to do and make the online presence of ZB a little more palpable.

So please, take some time to check out our Etsy store and let us know what you think. And check back often- we'll be adding a bunch of new stuff on an ongoing basis, starting very soon.

Don't call it a comeback.

Well, it's been a minute, hasn't it? Judging from the look of zeroboutique.com this last year, I wouldn't blame many of you for thinking that maybe I had died, gone to jail, or left the country. Broken images, blog posts so old they already had kids in college, wonky CSS and a Flash gallery that seemed to work approximately half the time (on a good day). Oh, and it was an online shirt store with one important distinction: for the last year or so, there was no way to purchase the shirts. Straight outta 1998, Holmes.

So what happened, man? Did I lose my marbles and just give up? Find that raising meerkats in Arizona was much more rewarding and profitable? Get married to my high school sweetheart who convinced me to give up on all this screen printing nonsense and go sell insurance for her father? Hell no. In fact, I didn't stop once. So why so quiet on the online front then, you may wonder? Well, it's kind of complicated.

Essentially, these last 2 & 1/2 years or so have been dedicated to a lot of research and development into new techniques, acquiring new equipment and inks in order to implement many of these techniques, and then of course putting those techniques and equipment to use. And it's been a ssssllllooowwww process. You saw the beginnings of that process on the old site.  Those shirts were the first ugly evolutionary leap out of the water for us, out of just being another screen printing shop printing our weird designs on generic t-shirts into being an actual clothing company that manufactures original pieces. That process is still very new and awkward and ongoing, but it's only been recently that the stuff has achieved the unique level where I felt it needed a new home. Zeroboutique.com was essentially dead to me- it had a really good 10 year run, but the site was in a way kind of a reminder of past glories. I had started to lose interest in just being another t-shirt company around 2007, and sales had consequently slowed over the years until they finally stopped completely. So I was tired of looking back. I decided the line had a new feel, so it needed a new logo and a new web site. Once I found out zbqfanclub.com was available, it was a no-brainer: ZBQ Fan Club was our first Facebook group and was pretty popular before Facebook forced us to create a new one due to some structural changes (for our current Facebook page go here). And so I sat down to create the new site, thinking I'd have it wrapped up in a month. As so often happens with these types of things, it took a lot longer to finish than anticipated. But finish it I did. And here it is.

And what's next? Well, more shirts of course. New prints, new artists, and a lot of new stuff (and some old stuff too) from artists we've been working with for years. But also prints, stickers, bags, things you can wear that aren't shirts at all, original art, "t-shirt canvasses", and much more that I haven't even thought of yet. I always said I'd keep doing this as long as I still enjoyed it. Well, it's been nearly 20 years now, and I feel like I'm just getting warmed up here. The best is most definitely yet to come. 

It's Bongo Boy!

I like hip hop, I haven't really kept up with things over the last few years but lately have been vibing on a lot of new stuff that's very exciting. Some of that exciting stuff has been discovered through a blog called It's Bongo Boy, started by a "kid from Jersey" named Matt Cohen who obviously has a ton of enthusiasm and love for music and uses that energy to expose a lot of deserving new voices out there. Props.