While on a recent flight, I watched a documentary about fast fashion and a) felt better about the long flight I was on and b) worse about the clothes I buy - and more importantly - sell and c) the entire fashion industry in general. 

So, I thought it was important to tell you why we print on demand and start making it more obvious on all of our apparel pages. 

So, here it is - and you can always access it on our "print on demand" page. 

In case you haven't heard, air travel sometimes gets a bad rap in terms of climate impact. From articles about people who have quit flying to save the planet to Taylor Swift, there's lot of information out there.

And for good reason. Transportation is a massive carbon emitter and source of pollution .

BUT

Let's talk numbers.

Number 1.
The worst offender in terms of carbon and pollution is generally agreed to be fossil fuels. The production of energy. It's falling because of the use of less coal but it's still up there.

Number 2.
The second worst offender is generally agreed to be the agricultural industry. (One of the reasons I personally try to eat "less meat".)

Number 3.
For some reason this one gets away with hardly any press and I'm still not sure why.

Fast fashion. That's right, the third worst offender (some say second) in terms of sending bad stuff into the air and ground and everywhere else, is fast fashion.

• 10% of all carbon emissions are from the fashion industry.
• 150 billion garments were produced in 2012 - over twice as many as the year 2000. You know what it is today? You don't want to know.
• 92 million tons of clothing ends up in landfills every year
• We're not even talking child labor, synethic fabrics, microplastics, etc...

 Number 4. 

Food retail. That's right. This includes stats like the U.S. throws away 38% of its food, or 80 million tons of food.

Number 5.
Transportation. Finally, we're here. But, wait. 40% of this is from the transportation of goods and 60% from people and a massive proportion of that is ground transportation.

Number 6.
No one is giving air travel a free pass but let's stop giving cheap clothes, waste, and all the other offenders a free pass too.

Number 7.
You may not care about this stuff, but I do. #1 I love travel more than anything and #2 I also love humanity and seeing the world as pristine as it can be. So, I can't handle just throwing shit into the air and hoping nothing happens.

Number 08.
Which is why we are a print on demand company for 99% of our products (excluding decals, socks, and signature tees right now).

• It allows us to keep up to date on all of our prints - which change constantly. Can you imagine stocking 500 ORD prints and finding out another taxiway changed?
• It allows us to TRY and slow down A BIT the massive production and waste of fashion. Not only do we only make a shirt if you want it, we also are very particular about what fabrics and factories and sources we use for the shells.

What's this cost you?
In short, it costs you a few days and a few dollars. Rather than stocking your sweatshirt, we print it when you order it, which does take a few days extra time.

It does cost a bit more but let me let you in on a secret. (I know this secret because I've talked to many factories around the world and have many friends in the apparel industries.) Print on demand is costing me money - not you. Instead of me printing a sweatshirt for $10 (which I could) and stocking 100 of them I pay A LOT more than that. Joke is most of the companies that pay $5 are charging you the same price - they're just making a lot more money than me.

But I'm cool with that.

And hopefully you are too.

Cheers!

ryan