A new day, a new blog.

JUST OVER A MONTH AGO, TypographyShop was born on a whim and actually took off. Really took off. I'd spent nearly three years on a political t-shirt venture that even I was questioning the wisdom of continuing. My own political passions were waning and certainly the nation's boredom with it all was obvious. The few that cared gave up long ago, choosing to wait out the current administration like a forfeited football game.

I learned a lot about e-commerce in those three years, though I didn't apply the knowledge well. My market was fractured across a number of issues we addressed and like the Democrat (sic) party there was no single water cooler at which I could reach my constituency.

Then one day, I put up a shirt that had nothing to do with politics. It had to do with type. Typography. The most ubiquitous of typefaces, Helvetica. Helvetica Neue to be precise.

Progresswear was only one of many ideas I'd considered for t-shirt lines. We also own The Wisconsin Store and will soon be releasing our first tees there. As a designer in love with type since early childhood (my father worked at a newspaper) I had always longed to do purely typographic work for type's sake. I had a dozen or so sketches for shirts about typography as well as some clever slogans that I felt might sell well among my fellow practitioners.

I ran the Helvetica Neue Descending a t-shirt by a dozen or so designers of my acquaintance here in Philadelphia. I believe I got one or two responses. A few days later I ran them by Jeffrey Zeldman. He immediately responded saying that he loved it and would take ten. I was torn between two designs, Jeffrey chose the one we went with.

I put the shirt on Progresswear, sent Jeffrey the link and within what seemed like minutes we sold our first shirt. By the end of the day we'd sold 27. A letter from a potential buyer who wasn't too pleased with Progresswear's politics made me see that I had to remove it immediately from that site. Unfortunate as I'd sold 6 Progresswear shirts that day - a rarity - to designers who did indeed dig our politics.

I'd had a half dozen names picked out that were available domains and quickly settled on typographyshop.com. We threw up a quickie site. Designed a logo in 5 minutes - which is still up there - and redirected the Progresswear traffic to typographyshop.

The first day's trafffic started with Zeldman putting a simple link in his twitter stream, his facebook page and on zeldman.com. Or was it some other tagging site? In what seemed like minutes Josh Spear posted it. NewsDesigner.com was next. By the end of the day over a dozen design blogs had featured our first offering.

Within a couple of days the esteemed I Love Typography featured us. I'd made the acquaintance of a dozen or so t-shirt bloggers in the Progresswear years and a few of them were happy to oblige as well. But it was the designers who drove it. Who bought it. The experience of reading comments on posts by buyers who didn't even know each other, gleefully awaiting the arrival of their shirts was a delight I'd never experienced.

After 30+ years of grinding out work for clients, to further their bottom line or tell their story, I was finally creating something that brought people joy. I don't believe I could say that about a single project of my career. Although the men and women I've made wealthier via my marketing chops might disagree.

Within two weeks we'd sold nearly 200 shirts. I was experiencing a rare moment of being swamped with real work for my design firm and the looming shipment of 200 shirts that weren't even printed yet. I decided to pull back on promotion until we got the first shirts out and I was over the hump of delivering creative on two websites, a logo, posters, billboards, and writing an ad campaign as well as acting as a project consultant on my hometown's Create Uptown Racine initiative.

The worst of the deluge is over and I'm most anxious to get back to concentrating on typographyshop. New product is on its way today. If anyone's actually reading this, thanks for stopping by.

cheers

Patrick King