When we made the t-shirts, we decided we wanted a funky little label sewn on, not anything screen-printed. So we ordered some funky little labels, and the label company asked if we’d like them sewn into the shirts for an extra 95c each.
Photos by Flickr user Passenger57.
Being a start-up, we decided to save costs and we’d sew them in ourselves… into nearly 200 shirts. So we borrowed a friend’s machine and set to it last night.
The last time I used a sewing machine was in 7th grade when I made a wonky pencil-case. But still, 95c is 95c, and I calculated that at 30 seconds per shirt, it would only take us an hour and forty minutes.
Two and a half hours later, I still couldn’t figure out how to get the machine threaded properly. And the problem with Wikipedia is it’s written by experts who don’t neccessarily understand what beginners don’t know, ie it’s easy for an expert to say “Thread the machine” but I need details! Which way does the thread go? Does the bobbin thing go clockwise or anti-clockwise? Why is it tangling over itself?
Sewing with wikipedia. Photo by Passenger57
We called in some reinforcements and a couple of bottles of nice shiraz, and an hour later managed to sew in a straight line.
Anyway to cut a long story (and long night) short, we decided to outsource and called in the experts - a little greek lady that has been a tailor for 31 years (who laughed at us trying to do it ourselves).
So total cost (to save 95c):
- 5 hours from 4 people
- 2 bottles of wine
- $2 per shirt from the little greek lady (we’ve since haggled her down a bit)
- An extra week for someone else to do the work for us
We’ve decided to stick with what we know, so this is a public declaration that at Molt:n Digital, we make websites. We’ll leave the sewing to the professionals!
This post is tagged under: random thoughts
That’s an excellent moral to the story :)
:-) I can see so much of myself in that story. I just hope I would be smart enough to come to the same solution… and not doggedly continue with the labels and create 200 wonky label shirts!
So will there be a third t-shirt now?
“I outsource sewing”.
The funny thing is, I was trying to explain to the greek lady what we were trying to accomplish and the issues we’d been having but she waved me away in the same way I probably do to non-geek friends when they tell me about a “cool new site” (that I’ve been using for the last year).
Then I tried to explain to be careful of the label shifting at the back and she said “I have been doing this for 31 years”.
I was suitably chastened.