That vision of the T-shirt happens to fit perfectly with the atomized nature of popular culture in the Internet age, when anyone can publish anything at any moment and powerful creative tools are in more hands than ever. The idea that you’d be wearing a piece of clothing only owned by a handful of people in the world is much more likely today than the chances of another “Just Do It” or “I Want My MTV” T-shirt craze becoming a thing.
“There are no real cultural monoliths anymore. Everyone is part of their own sort of nano-culture. And I think what Cotton Bureau is able to some extent to do is find other members of a nano-culture and display it on a T-shirt,” Fanelli says. “Someone is sort of putting a T-shirt out there as a beacon, and they’ll find a few dozen other people who respond to that.”
The blend of all these elements is what makes Cotton Bureau a little addictive. After pre-ordering a couple of shirts for myself, I started going back to the site to see if they’d make the cut or not. Then I’d find a few more designs I wanted, and plunk down a few more bucks to see if they could beat the two-week clock and go into production.
Soon after that, I was buying shirts for my wife and even thinking of other people who might like some of the designs that showed up—will my friend from Cleveland laugh at this “Ohio til I Die-O” shirt? I should send it to him as a housewarming gift!
The oddest part about Cotton Bureau as a business is that it probably shouldn’t even exist. The company grew out of a contract development agency, Full Stop Interactive, which was founded by Fanelli and Nathan Peretic. In fact, Cotton Bureau is the side project of a different side project: United Pixelworkers, a self-styled “fake union for Web designers and developers” that Full Stop started as a way to design and sell T-shirts to their colleagues around the country.
“We kind of used that as an excuse to launch a product, basically, which kind of ended up being a T-shirt brand. It wasn’t out of any great desire to make T-shirts,” Fanelli says. “It was more of an experiment in non-client revenue. It was a way for us to give back to our community a little bit. And it was a way for us to make a name for ourselves a little bit.”
This was 2010, and Fanelli and Peretic were growing tired of working in the client services industry. While the work paid the bills and allowed them do what they enjoyed, hitching their creative efforts and livelihoods to a rotating cast of outside bosses was getting old.
After sales of United Pixelworkers shirts began to grow, the pair asked outside designers to come up with new logos, which led to even more shirt sales. Eventually, people started asking whether Pixelworkers could branch out into different kinds of shirts that fans wanted to design.
With their experiment starting to look much more serious, the Full Stop crew decided to see if they might be able to take their T-shirt concept to a wider audience. That led to Cotton Bureau, a broader take on the Pixelworkers idea. It was launched in June 2013.
The problem was, T-shirts weren’t the full-time business—Fanelli and Peretic were still running Full Stop—but they thought it could be with a lot more focus. So they decided to grab one more big project, a redesign for Westfield, MA-based Westfield State University, their agency’s original big client. It was going to be “the last big score,” enough money to last through 2014 and maybe 2015, seeding their idea for a bigger T-shirt project, Fanelli says.
“We’d been saying, kind of as a backup to this, `Well, if we don’t get the job, we’ll just quit client services and just do T-shirts,’ never thinking that it would actually happen,” Fanelli says. “And then it actually happened.”
They decided to take the leap anyway, and in November, Full Stop quit taking on new clients. The final projects finished up this spring, and they began focusing on United Pixelworkers and Cotton Bureau as the sole businesses.
Cotton Bureau is profitable enough to grow on its own and keep the four-person team paid—along with creative director Fanelli and front-end developer Peretic, the business is run by third co-founder Matthew Chambers, who handles back-end development, and Sara Gardinier, in charge of customer service and fulfillment. Since they started producing T-shirts full-time, the business has doubled, Fanelli says.
“We have been subsisting exclusively on T-shirt revenue since about February of this year, which seems crazy to say,” he says. “We never thought, `One day, we’ll just sell T-shirts on the Internet.’”
As a business, it’s a little early to declare Cotton Bureau a total victory. But the fact that something like this could become a profitable, standalone business so quickly is a testament to the what’s still possible in the Internet age.
“The Internet is the great equalizer,” Fanelli says. “The means of production used to be what determined who had the power. And the Internet has provided so many means of production to so many people, that it’s really distributed the power to many more people now.”
So it doesn’t really matter that the creators of Cotton Bureau are based in Pittsburgh. It doesn’t matter that they don’t know where the next T-shirt design is coming from. A small group of people can find something they’re good at, connect with a larger group of people who think it’s good enough to pay for, and make enough money to feed their families. If you’re looking for T-shirts, there are worse ways to spend $25.
