Marching on

There was certainly no lion this March; only gorgeous day after gorgeous day, including a string of 80 degree days that had me itching for a baseball game to go to. Even the little amount of rain we've gotten this month has seemed refreshing and necessary. Now the question on every good Iowan's mind is how hot is it going to be in July? The answer of course is: as long as it's t-shirt weather, we don't really care how hot it is. Bring it, summer.

But we're not quite there yet. Despite the very warm March, it is still Spring, and there's a little nip in the air when the sun goes down. Not so much that you need a coat, but something lighter and warm (and super-comfortable of course). The American Apparel California Fleece Track Jacket fits that role perfectly, which is wh we're super pumped about our Honeybadger track jackets. Make sure you get yours soon as we only have a very limited number.

In the t-shirt realm, we have two new arrivals and one reprint that are all definitely worth checking out. The first is our homage to the Hawkeye state and the character in James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans for whom our state is nicknamed.

He was a mean shot with his "Hawk-eye."

This isn't necessarily a University of Iowa shirt (please don't sue us), but rather just a state-pride shirt. (If someone has an idea for a red and gold t-shirt design that won't get us sued by Iowa State, I'm all ears.)

Keeping it midwest chic, our latest t-shirt features a Honeybadger-ed tractor, and this month's reprint is of one of our first and still most popular designs: The Cornstalk. Hey, we're based in Iowa, and that's what we see all the time (along with stray livestock, meth heads, and presidential candidates).

Corn does the body good (except in Syrup form).

Honeybadger's tricked out ride.

Thanks for checking out our new stuff. If you see something you like, go grab it now. We're heading to Iowa City on Saturday for the Sycamore Craft Market, and who knows what we'll have left after the Hawkeyes get through with us. Happy t-shirt shopping!

Dave Murrin-von Ebers
Chief Entertainment Officer
http://honeybadgershirts.com

What we've been up to

February has been a hectic month for Honeybadger, which has left us feeling a bit out of touch with our loyal followers. So let's get you back up to speed. We started the month off by organizing a Honeybadger team for the the YMCA's Red Flannel Run. We printed up some logos and Honeybadger Army prints on the runners' cold weather gear and four of us braved single digit temps on the morning of February 11 to conquer the 3 mile and 5 mile course. Fortunately or unfortunately, we didn't stop to take a group pic in the frigid weather, but take my word that at the end of the race, we looked a little like Harry and Lloyd at the end of their scooter trek up the rockies.

Maybe we should dress like Harry & Lloyd for next year's Red Flannel Run...

But it was well worth it to say we conquered the cold and had fun doing it. Plus, warming up with some coffee and a big breakfast at Baby Boomer's helped ease the chills.

Aside from having fun in the finally-arrived cold weather, we've also been printing, and printing, and printing custom t-shirt orders. We just finished up two big orders for Hessen Haus and Startup City Des Moines.

Which means not quite as hard as the Irish, but with better beer.

Indeed it is, Startup City. Indeed it is.

We've also knocked out some smaller orders. One was for our friends at The Lettuce Sports Blog. If you haven't checked out their unique look at sports, I highly recommend it. One of these days they might even get yours truly to write about my love/hate relationship with the Iowa Hawkeyes football team.

And another order was for Special Olympics basketball team, just in time for their tournament.

I had to swallow my pride a bit to print something with such a likeness to a certain demonic school in the Big Ten, but it was for a good cause, and they ended up looking pretty sweet.

We're also finishing up shirts for a bachelorette party (no penises involved), and an awesome custom t-shirt entitled Pac-Man Smurf. Oh yeah, and we did manage to squeeze in printing our lovely St. Patrick's day shirts, available for only the bravest of drinkers.

Order yours today and get a free Sham-Wow*!

 *That's a bold-faced lie, but you should still order one, cause they're awesome.


With all that going we hardly had time to eat let alone order and print our newest Honeybadger designs. But never fear. For those who have been itching for the new designs, especially the track jackets, the order is in, and they should be arriving any day. Once we bust out a couple more small custom orders we will start printing our own stuff again (finally!) and before you know it, they'll be ready to adorn your beautiful bodies.

The Hawkeye design and the Honeybadger track jacket are a go for sure. We'll be restocking our unisex Honeybadger Army shirts as we start recruiting Iowa City followers at the Sycamore Craft Market, March 31. And last, but certainly not least: a very exciting announcement. Just in time for Moustache March our first and most popular moustache design will be available once again!

Get your Moustache March on for some sweet deals at the Royal Mile.

Commonly referred to as the Tom Selleck (or as just plain awesome) these bad boys sold out in less than 24 hours the last time we printed them. You can pre-order yours now so you don't miss out, and we'll ship it to you as soon as they're printed!

As always, thanks for tuning in, and for all of your support. Here's to hoping March is as busy as February!

Dave Murrin-von Ebers
Chief Entertainment Officer

New Design Ideas for a New Year

New Year's Resolutions are cheap. Everybody talks about them and nothing much happens except the gym suddenly becomes overly crowded for about a month. That being said, I've resolved to write more Honeybadger blogs this year, so here goes!

It's time to get some new designs out there methinks, but I'd love to get some feedback from you -- the few, the proud, the Honeybadger Army -- before ordering shirts and going to print. First up, St. Patrick's Day! Our Irish flavored shirts went over well last year, so we're going to give it another shot. Here are the two design ideas that have risen to the top so far:

This would be our first "word shirt" as far as I know. Personally, this is my favorite.

Also pretty sweet. I may be biased for the first, because this would be a little harder to print.

But of course, before St. Patrick's Day, there's that other saintly day that's not quite as fun. We happen to have some women's heather black shirts lying around, and I thought this simple design about love might be something Saint Valentine (and the mystery "tagger" in Des Moines) would appreciate.

Too simple? Or awesomely simple? What do you think?

Here's another idea for these shirts that's not quite so Valentine's Day themed:

Did you know there's a Honeybadger constellation? It's science.

Looking ahead a bit, we'll be attending the Sycamore Market in Iowa City on March 31. I thought it would be nice to bring something that Hawkeyes would appreciate, without getting into all the messy trademark issues with school logos. For those who don't know where Iowa got its nickname from, here's a fun fact for you: In 1838, Iowa approved the nickname the Hawkeye State in homage to the scout Hawkeye in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. That should help our design make a little more sense.

The original "Hawkeye."

Finally, the cold weather makes it hard to wear t-shirts all the time, and it can get old wearing the same Honeybadger hoodie everyday, so I thought we might add a jacket to our repetoir. With the recent announcement of the Urban Assault Ride date here in Des Moines (which coincides with a certain t-shirt company owner's birthday), we were inspired to trade the track theme for a bike theme. Team Honeybadger anyone?

That's all from the Honeybadger studios for now. Let us know what you think. Positive feedback will move these from the drawing room to the printing room in a hurry, while criticism is always welcome, and we will work to make the design better or scrap it all together. Either way we want to hear from you! Feel free to post comments here or on our Facebook Page. Thanks!

Dave Murrin-von Ebers
Chief Entertainment Officer

A Look Back at 2011

The year that Honeybadger grew from the smallest t-shirt company in Des Moines to a slightly bigger, more sophisticated and more well-known t-shirt company that still happens to be, for all intents and purposes, the smallest in Des Moines.

Mat hard at work on a screen-printing order for Carrier Access in Des Moines.

At the beginning of 2012, the Honeybadger web store had been officially launched (and we had thrown a big bash where we got our friends tipsy and sold them shirts), we had amassed a small, but sufficient inventory of original graphic t-shirts, and we had enough social media pages to keep us busy (read: dizzy) for hours every day.  After spending much of the winter months completing small screen-printing orders and building upon our own inventory shirts, it was now time to get down to the real business of making shirts and gettin' people in 'em.

As we all know, t-shirts are one of the most vital means of human communication proclaiming such important messages to the world as "I'm with Stupid" or "This is my drinking shirt," so we decided to let our shirts sell themselves. The key was to have them worn in a highly visible place. With St. Patrick's Day around the corner, we "Irished-up" our logo and designed an Irish clover shirt. Then we got the most popular people on St. Patrick's Day--bartenders and servers--to wear them. In the immortal words of Guinness: "Brilliant!"

With help from the fine folks at the Royal Mile and Hessen Haus, our two Irish-inspired Honeybadger tees were on display all day as the Irish and wanna be Irish population of Des Moines got good and sloshed. Though we didn't immediately start selling shirts like hotcakes, our first interactive marketing foray got a lot of people asking, "What's Honeybadger?" Some more YouTube savvy Des Moinesians laughed and asked if the shirts were based on the Honeybadger video that had recently gone viral. They weren't, nor is our company name, but thanks for laughing along and taking pictures of our shirts anyway.

After St. Patrick's Day, we went back to the drawing board and came up with a slew of new designs to add to our web site for the Spring/Summer.  As we built a substantial inventory of shirts (read: Holy Smokes, Batman, how are we going to sell all of these?), we caught a big break when applying to be a vendor at the 2nd annual Market Day. Though this popular event usually has a waiting list to participate, the stars aligned and vendors dropped out just in time for us to sneak in. June came and we eagerly set up shop and officially had a physical location to sell shirts.

The Honeybadger booth at this year's Black Friday Market Day.

And sell shirts we did! It's safe to say that Market Day was the biggest thing to happen to Honeybadger Shirts since we discovered Strip-E-Doo Emulsion remover. Not just because we sold a significant amount of shirts--we sold out of 24 moustache shirts in several hours--but because it was a great way to infiltrate the local/indie shopping culture of Des Moines. For that we can't thank the organizers behind Market Day, Cat and Dani, enough for all the hard work they put in marketing and organizing the event. We can't wait to be a part of Market Day 2012!

Still flying high from our first Market Day experience, my relentless use of social media as our only major means of marketing paid off in a big way--I scored free VIP tickets to 80/35 thanks to Dwolla! I had already planned to rock out at Iowa's best music festival in my Honeybadger garb, but now I could do it in the comforts of the VIP section, while enjoying free food and booze and turning my nose up at the general admission hipsters.

Hipsters cram in at 80/35, while I enjoy so much more room for activities in VIP!

Turnning my nose up (and drinking waaaay too much red bull) was great, but the highlight of my 80/35 experience, was on the second day of the festival when a stranger, recognizing the Honeybadger logo shirt I was wearing, asked if I was with Honeybadger. I was thrilled that anyone would recognize our logo, but I was even more excited to learn that this stranger was none other than Ben Anderson, an owner of 8/7 Central, the downtown screen-printing company.We talked shop for a bit, and Ben was nothing but friendly and supportive of our efforts to bring another t-shirt and screenprinting company to Des Moines. Having your "competition" all but cheer you on, is one reason among many that Des Moines is a great place to start a business. If there is a more supportive community out there, I'd love to see it.

The summer rolled on and before we knew it, it was slipping away. Determined not to let that happen, Mat and I took a break from designing and printing and rocked the New Belgium Urban Assault Ride as team Honeybadger.

Great ride! Now where's the beer?

This crazy race, which consists of biking all over town, completing somewhat bizarre team activities in order to get a clue about the next checkpoint location, and washing it all down with New Belgium beer, inspired us not only to drink lots of  beer, but to think about the possibility of hosting our very own Honeybadger extreme race some day. It may be long down the road, but this is definitely something we want to do, and if you have any ideas or would like to help make something like that happen, feel free to let us know!

Moving into fall, Honeybadger got busy on the screen-printing side of things. We designed and printed Oktoberfest shirts for Hessen Haus, which were a big hit, selling out in the weeks following the festival. We also teamed up with a friend of ours to make motorboat t-shirts to support breast cancer awareness. (We still have shirts available if you want to support the cause!) And we printed shirts for our friends at Party! Party! Karaoke Band. If you haven't been to see Party! Party!, then you are missing out on a genuinely awesome Des Moines experience. Sing karaoke with the band on Thursdays at People's downtown.

With the cold weather coming we geared up on new Honeybadger designs including our first hooded sweatshirt, a beanie hat and a line of scarves. Then we put our cold-weather gear to the test as Team Honeybadger tackled the Living History Farms Cross Country Race, another awesome outdoor adventure race, this time using two feet instead of a two wheels.

Honeybadger teammates John and Signe close in on the finish at the LHF race.

 
Before we knew it, the holiday season was upon us, and as a retail store, we had no choice but to participate in the craziness of Black Friday. Fortunately, the Black Friday Market Day is a much more sane experience than the stay-up-all-night shopping binge that occurs across that country and generally results in bloodshed (or at least pepperspray) of some kind. With some help from our first official seasonal employee, Black Friday Market Day successfully launched Honeybadger into the Christmas season of conspicuous consumption!

Throughout December, we were inundated with screen-printing orders, web site orders and even special requests to make sure that everyone got the Honeybadger present they were looking for this Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza or other holiday. It was a bit hectic, but Mat, Luke and I kept our heads on a swivel and worked like oversized elves to make sure everything was completed on time!

Phew. That about wraps it up. To all our friends, family, fans, patrons, and supporters of any kind we would all like to extend a very VERY big THANK YOU! Whether you bought a shirt, designed a shirt, helped us set up for Market Day, wore a shirt in public and told someone about it, posted a picture of yourself in a Honeybadger shirt to facebook, or just said, "You own a t-shirt company? That's awesome!", thank you, thank you, thank you for your support.

To start our 2012 off right, Juice Magazine featured Honeybadger in their made in Des Moines article for Jan. 4. Check it out! And then if you haven't had enough of us yet, or you're looking to kill more time at work, take a look at some more Honeybadger pictures from 2011.

Cheers to a happy 2012,

Dave

Our friend Signe sent us this great action shot of the bike tee.

Rachel rocking the bar. Peacefully, of course.

Goo! Be Gone! The dirty work behind screen-printing.

Real men drink big beers...And sometimes wear purses apparently...

Emily is straight gangsta'

Dam to Dam.

Hand grenade, hand grenade, hand grenade.

Photo shoot on bourbon street. I've really got to get my friends in Honeybadger tees.

Can you see the pain on my face? Marathons hurt.

You motorboatin' sunuvab****

Best faux-wedding that never happened.

The ink has to be just right. Luke's an expert on the matter.

Mat doin' work!

Another glorious screen-printing job.

Salud! A Honeybadger birthday shot for John's bday.

Serious pool players wear Honeybadger.

Preppin' to run!

Also preppin'

Running. Really Fast.

Porn stache.

Smile while you bartend, Eric! Isn't St. Pat's fun?

Future's so bright...

Twinsies!

Nice boa, Tommy.

Rocking out with none other than Party! Party!

Happy 2012 from the Honeybadger gang!