Earlier this week, globally renowned graffiti artist, EWOK painted three 8’ x 4’ panels in his Santa Ana studio. Today, he’s wearing a t-shirt with a detail of the panel on it. For this collection, it took EWOK four days to paint the panels and it took three days for the finished shirts to arrive. In the apparel industry, that’s unheard-of fast. “Just the fact that we went from finished art to finished product in a matter of days is pretty amazing,” he says.
EWOK made a capsule collection—which includes t-shirts, sweatshirts, tote bags, and phone cases—using Yoshirt, an app that lets you snap a pic, upload it to the app, and manipulate your design right there. Yoshirt then prints each custom order on demand. The shirts might be fast, but they’re also premium quality. Every design is printed onto the fabric using dye sublimation, a technique that permanently dyes the fibers so the image doesn’t just sit on top of the shirt and fade in time or in the wash. The fabric is then hand-cut, sewn, labeled and shipped. The time between the moment you open the app to the second you’re wearing your shirt is less than two weeks.
EWOK has designed shirts for 15 years and has worked with several apparel lines; with them it’s not so fast. “It kind of just depends how long you’ll have to wait. What’s the scheduling for their seasons look like? But it’s usually four, five, or six months until you see the initial prototype,” he says. “By the time it comes out, I’ve forgotten I’ve even done it. I like the immediate gratification of getting to see what I’ve spent time on. It’s definitely better than actually forgetting I’ve done it.”
EWOK’s new collection isn’t just ready-to-wear within the week—it’s also ready to buy in the Yoshirt marketplace. As soon as the design is done, it’s in the shop and since every piece is made to order, every size and style is always in stock.
“It’s a huge plus that I can promote it on Instagram,” he says. “That’s where everything is at as far as getting your work out there and getting noticed, especially if you have a network of people who are already paying attention to what you’re doing. Ten years ago, you had to network with real life people in real life. There was no way then to tell everyone in the world at once about a new piece you just did. Now, I can bombard them with images.” And, crazy fast, those images are t-shirts and totes they can be wearing within weeks.
Yoshirt CoFounder Brian Garofalow adds, “Working with artists like EWOK is a great example of how Yoshirt changes the apparel business – going from concept to customization to consumer in such a short amount of time, with the entire transaction from discovery to purchase and customer service happening in the palm of your hand is responsive to a new generation of shoppers needs and wants.”
The EWOK collection is available the Yoshirt Store now: https://shop.yoshirt.com/collections/ewok
About Yoshirt:
Yoshirt is a technology company providing consumers, brands, and IP owners, the ability to create or allow their existing consumers to create one of a kind apparel garments with user-generated designs via a mobile application. Through a unique user experience, transaction process and innovative supply chain, Yoshirt can offer end users, one of a kind, premium apparel at competitive market prices, manage a direct relationship with the end consumer, and have no significant time or cost burdens of traditional wholesale apparel businesses. Yoshirt is innovating a new, complimentary distribution channel to connect brands to consumers. Learn more at https://www.yoshirt.com
