V.D. (Valentine's Day) & T-shirts

Valentine’s Day is a week away, and I think it’s time for a statement about the envy of all greeting card holidays: While we won’t be celebrating it by sending out artery clogging milk chocolates, sweet slinky vibrating panties, or a dozen half-dead allergenic roses, we will give you some advice. Be a little creative guys. Don’t just have a hoity toity dinner over candlelight like every other unimaginative sap in the country. Take her to a hockey game on dollar beer night. Follow it up with three bottles of wine and a shot or two of absinthe. By then you and your girl should be feeling rather adventurous, so cap the night by running a tab on your company’s cards at a strip club, trying to have that coveted threesome, and end up single, with a truly nice V.D. (no, that doesn’t stand for Valentine’s Day). Now that's the kind of Valentine's Day we can get behind.

But I digress. The real point of all of this is that in honor of Valentine’s Day we here at Honeybadger would like to pay tribute to other graphic tee companies that make a product that we are grossly infatuated with.  Yes, Cupid’s arrow caught us square on the ass while we were searching the web. While some people have fetishes for feet, peanut butter, underwear and sneezes (yes, sneezes), we at Honeybadger have a fetish for shirts. Check out some of the best in the business in our humble opinion:

 Ames Bro’s:  Spawned from the high mountain crags and barren dust bowls of Montana, the Ames Bros (Coby Schultz and Barry Ament) are a two man wrecking crew. Upon their mighty shoulders they carry with them scores of famous rock bands, hundreds of screen printed rock posters.  Along with a shirt we will pay homage to one of their great rock posters.

  

2    Threadless: This is a company after my own bleeding heart.  I would send their main artist a prepackaged fruit cake, but that would be hard, considering they don’t employ artists.  Instead artists compete with their own kick ass creative designs and the website users vote.  What a great effing idea. Wish I would have thought of that, but alas, I did not, and I’m still a poor entrepreneur living in a city by the Raccoon River. 

 Raygun: Our own local legends in the biz.  Mike Draper’s mixtures of political sarcasm and local humor have made his east village tee shirt company a Des Moines staple. Thank you Raygun for adding something this town needs: a sense of humor and some local pride. Now he just needs to front the cash for damn train to Chicago and our fair city will really be in business.  Oh, and we’re seriously looking for the day that Raygun starts manufacturing shirts right here in Des Moines: Hell yes!!!

             OBEY: Now Shepard Fairey is one cool guy. Drink your white Russian and listen up, this uber talented screen printer made a kick ass stencil of Andre the Giant (the wrestler not the candy bar) and spray painted them all over the previously drab world.  You know that takes a lot of balls (this is not meant to offend, but rather is a representation of courage and gusto. Please if you are offended read the owner’s manual on the blog post go **** yourself).  That red and blue picture of Obama that is so full of HOPE, ya he made that too.  

 

       So we want to hear from you. Get all interactive. What are you favorite tees and or screen-printers? Or, what's your outrageous, inventive and ingenious plan for Valentine's Day?

  

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