The Vintage T-Shirts Expedition

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new T-Shirt Road Trip blog, chronicling the adventures of our newest Scout, Gabe Johnson, as he scours the country in search of the t-shirts and stories that make up our growing collection. Now you can follow along with his first-hand account of a day-in-the-life of a Destee-Nation T-Shirt Scout, on the road.

710 KIRO Radio’s infamous duo Ron & Don of The Ron & Don Show  invited our founder, Matt Morgan, to spend some quality on-air time discussing Destee-Nation and our ongoing t-shirt expedition. One thing that stands out about radio is just how quickly and articulately these guys can make their point and cover all the bases! Callers rang in to suggest their favorite spots (some even recommended places we already have!), and overall it was a great day in the sound studio. Visit their website to listen to the full interview.

Wow, have we ever had a record week! The New York Times Magazine column about Destee-Nation has sent countless new customers our way, resulted in lots more press and inspired a whole helluva a lot of you to fill out our new Suggest a T-Shirt Form. We’re absolutely thrilled and hard at work printing and shipping and responding to all of you.

Here are a few of our favorite magazines, newspapers and blogs that have mentioned us this week:

Adbusters

Styledash

Seattle Weekly

Authenticitybook.com

Buy Local Pasadena

Citizen Rain

When columnist and author, Rob Walker contacted our founder a couple months ago for a piece he wanted to do, we quickly did our research and discovered a kindred spirit. Rob’s new book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, strikes a deep chord and articulates so many of the original notions we embraced when we started this little t-shirt company. We feel honored to be the recipients of his attention and powerful words.

Go read Rob Walker’s great piece about Destee-Nation in his New York Times Magazine column Consumed! You can also visit his blog Murketing.com to read an archive of Consumed and so much more.

We’re finally ready to announce our big news: Destee-Nation t-shirts are now on sale at Nordstrom! After a few months of meetings, planning and some grueling production decisions, we shipped our first order to Seattle-area and Southern California Nordstrom stores earlier this week. Next up on the agenda: Northern California and Hawaii, with Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Texas and Florida all on the docket later this year.

In spite of its nation-wide presence and household name, at heart Nordstrom is a family-run and privately operated company, and we have felt that energy resonating from everyone who has been integral in this process. Everyone we’ve worked with has been super helpful and accommodating, and if you’ve ever shopped at Nordstrom, you’ll know the sales team members are knowledgeable about their products and take great care to assist their customers.

We feel confident our relationship with them will be lasting and rewarding for all of our Destee-Nation member businesses, whether their t-shirts are sold in Nordstrom or just benefit from the added buzz to our t-shirt shop.

We’ve been noticing that a lot of our new customers land on our website after searching for vintage t-shirts. Many of them find what they’re looking for and buy a couple t-shirts. Some of them, however, click away when they don’t see the t-shirts they were expecting. The way we see it, we’re one of three distinct varieties of vintage t-shirt shops online. There are:

1. Places that carry t-shirts advertising vintage products or pop culture nostalgia, like Tab and RC Cola t-shirts or the Ghostbusters and Sesame Street tees.
2. Places that offer t-shirts with vintage styling, as in 70s fonts and 50s graphic design. These shirts aren’t really vintage; they’re just made to look that way.
3. And, in a class all our own, Destee-Nation. Our vintage t-shirts feature establishments from up and down the West Coast and in Hawaii. We started out characterizing a t-shirt as vintage if it met one of the following criteria:

• The place it represents has been around for a long time. Many of our member businesses have been selling their t-shirts since the middle of the last century.
• The represented business is a historic monument or landmark of some kind.

Recently, in our attempt to play fair with the shops that don’t have authentic vintage shirts, we decided to add our t-shirts with vintage styling to our featured list of vintage tees.

So check them out and, if you’re so inclined, let us know what you think about the term vintage.

A question our Kona staff heres over and over again is, “Do you guys have hats for these places too?” And now we do. Well, almost anyway. We currently have five of our favorite Hawaiian Destee-Nation designs (plus a couple from our store) embroidered on quality baseball caps, and more are on the way for many more of our member businesses.

Yet another way to show your local pride!

The Seattle Channel, a local television station that presents an eclectic series of shows about all things Seattle on cable TV (Channel 21 on Comcast and Millennium) and online, contacted us to do a piece on our t-shirt company. The City-a-Go-Go crew filmed a few days later and turned the whole thing around in a week. We’re thrilled with the way Nancy Guppy and her talented team put this together.

Visit The Seattle Channel for the complete City-a-Go-Go episode and much, much more.

As our t-shirt scouts head into some new terriotory in the coming weeks and months, Arizona and Kauai in the current and near term, I’ve been on the lookout for resources to help plan their missions. Finding places that locals love and patronize can sometimes be a challenge, particularly if they’re off the beaten path, but not anymore…

Tripadvisor has frequently been a top source of research for us, but now that we’ve ventured into their forums there’s no turning back. I posted a request for suggestions before we head over to Kauai in a couple weeks, and the response has been phenomenal. Check out all of the cool t-shirt ideas these knowlegeable locals threw out there for us.

Yesterday along with millions of other Americans, Destee-Nation took part in Take your Daughters (& Sons) to Work Day. Jamie, our silkscreen master brought his daughter Jessica, and Chris, our marketing guru and Seattle rep, was accompanied by his youngest daughter Rachael.

Having helped her dad from the wee age of two, Jessica is no stranger to a print shop. She’s a master folder and knows her way around the shop better than many people 3 times her age. It was Rachael’s first time at Destee-Nation HQ, and she made the most of it. She met with several of our member business owners, helped send emails and actually got to print her own shirt. And, it was thanks to Rachael that we took part in this nationwide event in the first place. She found information about it online and even wrote up a little reminder card for dad.

Maybe next year we’ll get lucky and be visited by all our Destee-Nation kiddos, including Peter’s baby girl on the way.