Part I - The T Shirt

Americans are "consuming" tee shirts: 3.2 billion tees were sold in 2010 alone and this works out to an average of 10 tee shirts per person every year!  In 1990, Americans averaged 4 tee shirt purchases annually; so we have increased our annual consumption of tee shirts by an additional 1 shirt every three years on average.  Makes you wonder what people do with last year's tees?

There is not much that occurs in our lives that does not involve a tee shirt. There is not much that we do in our lives that we could not do in a tee shirt.  But can you name your favorite tee?  Can you remember the label of the last tee you purchased and or received?  Do you even notice where your tee was made?  Do you even realize that a blank, basic tee is a style option?

Tee shirts are the basic building block for individual self expression and for the establishment of a community. They can be the ultimate status symbol or the most utilitarian; the vanguard of the Web 2.0 movement, the whole idea of 'consumer centric' business models began with a basic tee shirt.  The reality is that even today, a couple of hundred of dollars spent on screen printed tees achieves a higher ROI to small businesses than does  a thousand dollars a month spent on social media, pay per click, and or SEO!

Even the Travel Channel diva, Samantha Brown, says you should never leave home without a few tee shirts in your luggage to use as gifts while you travel:

"So it's nice to have something to give -- one or two T-shirts from your own hometown is a great place to start. They don't take up a lot of room in your luggage or add on much weight."

That is a pretty lofty pedigree for something as mundane as a tee shirt!

When I talk about a tee shirt I am actually discussing a blank shirt or what most designers perceive as a blank canvas and most advertisers see as a blank billboard.  What is really interesting, besides how big the market is  is also how diverse it is.  When you are looking at screen print lines the names Gildan, Alstyle, Tultex, Anvil, American, and Alternative pop up and if you ask the general market, you would hear names such as Fruit Of The Loom, Delta and Hanes.  Then of course you have the specialty tee shirt lines such as Continental Clothing and Alta Gracia which offer tee shirts with a social conscious.

I was pretty surprised to read this article and come to realize how shoddy most standards were for your basic tee shirt; personally, if I was involved in any of these companies I would get busy cleaning up our standards!

With the increase in the price of cotton recently we are seeing a variety of ways to replace cotton as a basic commodity in tee shirts; You have Tencel and Hemp as two examples.

Exactly how important is the basic blank tee shirt to the world at large?  Now that one can have their own label put on the neck of shirt, does where one gets their blank tee shirt really matter?  Does how and where a tee shirt is made really matter?  I can't help but wonder with the push toward "customization" in regards to apparel, exactly how much would the consumer be willing to pay for something 'more' than your basic tee shirt?

Can a basic tee shirt be anything more than an after thought to a world focused on customization and individualization?

Fail Often

I am haunted by an article that I read many years ago on a plane heading to the west coast; it was an article about a survey that the top 100 successful business people took and the key result was that they claimed that they failed at 70% of what they attempted.

Of course, it takes some time to grasp something that is mathematically at odds with our assumptions; success is based upon the fact that one does not give up but rather keeps learning, evolving, and trying.

Or as Thomas Edison has said, "I have not failed, I've just 10,000 ways that won't work."

That is why, when I read things like, "(b)efore changing careers, experts say, ask yourself some basic questions. For example, are your current skills obsolete, or will they soon be back in demand? "  I cannot help but wonder how anyone could have skills that are obsolete?  If you are continuously learning, evolving, and trying then exactly how can ones acquired knowledge, aka skills, become obsolete?

But then again, I never really grasped the concept of "career change" because I am a challenge seeker rather than a resume builder; I want to know what the challenges of a job are not the skills required to perform the tasks of a job.

It’s kind of like the question of, "...if you could do things over would you do things differently?"  Of course, all of us would!  But the reality is without continuously learning, evolving, and trying nothing would be different; the end results would be the same.

Wisdom is nothing more than trying, failing, learning, evolving, and trying again...over and over again!  Success is nothing more than learning to fail faster!

Every benefit has a cost and if you fear failure then you will never enjoy success.  I have been fired more than once and I need two hands to count the number of times I have been “…sent to the house” but in each and every case, each and every time I was back at work within two days.

Think about it, 100 of the top business leaders admit that they fail 70% of the time!  If you have a success rate higher than 30%, and lets be honest, most of us shoot for at least a 75% success rate, then obviously, based upon a poll of the highest achieving business leaders, most of us are not attempting to accomplish much.