​The industry that creates and sells decorated apparel is an American phenomenon that emerged over time due to changing lifestyles and technological advances. Social and political movements. and evolving consumer preferences. The terminology for this industry today includes "decorated apparel," '·apparel graphics," embellished clothing," or "the T-shirt industry." But whatever you choose to call it. The field encompasses a vast realm of components - from those who create, manufacture, and distribute leisure apparel to those who transform "blank'" apparel into everything from utilitarian everyday garb to graphic masterpieces and trendy fashion attire.

​A brief look into the industry's history will help anyone thinking of participating in the world of decorated apparel understand its roots, its cultural derivatives, and its continuing appeal.
The genesis event that started the T-shirt on its way to mass appeal occurred in 1913 when the basic white T-shirt was made part of the standard uniform of the U.S. Navy. By the 1930s, the T-shirt was marketed as a men's underwear product referred to as a "gob shirt" or
'gob-style" shirt, owing to its association with sailors.

​During WWII, T-shirts, though officially undershirts, became a preferred choice as a comfortable warm, weather garment, favored by American sailors serving in the South Pacific theater. After the war, T-shirts rose in acceptance as an underwear staple in the 1950s. With navy veterans leading the way, they moved to center stage as leisure and recreational apparel. 

Among the factors driving the increase in appeal and mass acceptance was the leading role performance of actor James Dean in the motion picture Rebel Without A Cause in 1955. Hot on his critical success in East of Eden, Dean played a T-shirt-clad troubled teen and, in so doing, quickly attained celebrity as the reigning Hollywood symbol of alienation and volatility of the mid-50s youth culture. His death on September 30, 1955, affected the beginning of a personality cult following whose adherents saw Dean's T-shirt as an iconic representation of youth culture.

Marlon Brando, who, like Dean, embraced the naturalist ''method acting;' wore a white T-shirt under his leather motorcycle jacket in The Wild One. That visual permanently reinforced the "coolness" of T-shirts as the de rigueur apparel of the new American youth culture, as thoroughly masculine, and what any self-respecting teen male, rebellious or otherwise, should be wearing, especially when the ladies were around. Elvis Presley, too, merits mention as another pop culture icon who preferred wearing T-shirts when hanging out with his buds.

In the early '50s screen printed T-shirts -- and sweatshirts -- appeared, initially within the custom arena encompassing schools, colleges, clubs, and summer camps. By the mid-60s, printed tees and sweats had earned permanent positions on souvenir stands and college bookstores racks and shelves.
Colorful graphics emerged as an offshoot of the colorful custom art done on hot rods. Particularly in California and Florida, automotive airbrush artists enjoyed the fun and profit of turning their talents and high-pressure airbrushes from decorating funky cars to creating funky T-shirts, the standard uniform of gearheads.
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One popular method of multicolor decorating on shirts was to start with direct-screened black line-art or heal-printed graphics and colorize them by airbrushing additional colors onto the designs. Taking their cues from the street rodders, California airbrush artists made decorated T-shirts a fixture at the beach, too, where colorfully-designed T-shirts quickly became the favorite garb of surfers as The Beach Boys exploded on the music scene. Philadelphia heart-throbs Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, and Fabian moved into their subsequent careers as stars of Hollywood's new genre - beach flicks - with Annette Funicello and other hot starlets; youth culture in the early '60s was being propelled by AM radio and network TV to mirror whatever was happening in California. And tens of millions of Mickey Mouse Club alumni, the first generation to grow up with T-shirts as an integral part of their attire, made T-shirts the virtual uniform of the Baby Boomers.

The antiwar protest in the late 1960s elevated decorated T-shirts into a medium for mass expres­sion as well as for individual expression. Until the Vietnam War, deco­rated rated tees and sweats told the world where you visited as a tourist, what school or college you were attending, and who your favorite team was. With the T-shirt already the after-class garment of choice for col­lege students, young protesters quickly discovered their T-shirts could, with four spray-painted strokes, be emblazoned with a single icon to indicate where one stood on the question of continued American mili­tary involvement in Southeast Asia.

​With prices hiked way up, major gasoline providers soon moved to become not only the wholesalers and distributors of gasoline but also its retailers. The traditional American institution of the service station that dispensed gasoline was earmarked for extinction. Big Oil canceled station leases where it could to eliminate competition from independent operators and reduced the volume available to those remaining operators where it couldn't. The corporate-owned gasoline superstation had replaced its two-pump ancestor within a few years. Thousands of small neighborhood and highway gas stations were vacated by their owners, who lost their leases and the ability to procure the gasoline for resale that provided them with their retail profits and their main drawing cards for customers.

Needing tenants for these highly-visible abandoned gas stations, their owners offered low rents to anyone who could cover the landlord's real estate taxes and monthly mortgages. Enter a cadre of Baby-Boomer entrepreneurs, now in their 20s and 30s, in search of low-cost locations for specific newly-emerging business categories that flourished in these old stations: plant and flower shops, specialty food and produce stores, and T-shirt shops.
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These new retail T-shirt stores offered immediate gratification through the medium of T-shirts decorated with heat transfers and custom iron-on lettering and at very reasonable prices. The generation that grew up in T-shirts and wore their political opinions in the '60s now opted to wear messages of their creation and colorful multicolor plastisol graphics. They could buy a while-u-wait custom gift for under ten bucks and had an alternative to sporting goods stores for outfitting the teams they -- or their kids -- played on. Customers soon began asking the retailers if they could provide what we refer to as custom orders for schools, businesses, events, and organizations today.

This blog comes from the works of industry consultant Mark Venit. Mark was a consultant for Northwest Custom Apparel for 20 years. We will miss you Mark. 
Jim and Erik Mickelson

​While you are on a construction site wearing a Carhartt hoodie or jacket and looking down at the Carhartt logo, you wonder what Carhartt's history was? You may think Carhartt is a brand for 20-30 years of age. Nope, you are almost 100 years off that guess. In 1889 Carhartt was founded by Hamilton Carhartt in Detroit, Michigan. Carhartt's started with two embroidery machines and six employees and was similar to Northwest Custom's beginning, but 100 years earlier. Old man Carhartt had a saying, "Honest value for an honest dollar." that resonated with many laborers in the Detroit area. 

The 1890s were booming for Carhartt, with the Trans Northern Railroad laying track only 2 miles from Carhartt's original manufacturing site. The site was perfect for Carhartt to sell jackets to the railway workers. Plus, being so close to the rail tracks, he could ship his jackets to the West Coast. Carhartt's expansion grew to 8 facilities around the country and continued growing until the Great Depression hit. 

​The Great Depression did thousands of businesses to close down and send their workers packing. Carhartt wasn't immune to this either; however, they pivoted and refocused on new customers and products. Carhartt closed down its jacket manufacturing facilities and started to make canvas tents from the same fabric as their jackets. The tents were for the workers of Roosevelt's "New Deal" program, the WPA (Works Progress Administration). President Roosevelt executed the WPA in May of 1935 to lift the bludgeoned economy out of the Depression. The Carhartt and the "New Deal" put thousands of workers back into Carhartt's factories, weaving canvas and sewing together tents for the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corp). The CCC would cut trails in the newly formed National Park System. The CCC workers would again wear the Carhartt jacket and camp in the tents manufactured by Carhartt. It was a boom for Carhartt and its employees, who remained employed before leaving to fight in World War 2 in the early 1940s. 

The boom of the Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal had Carhartt riding on cloud nine financially before World War II started and drafting many male employees. Luckily, Carhartt could retain many female seamstresses and hire additional "Sally the Seamstresses" to work while the men were fighting off Adolph Hitler. World War II was even a better deal for Carhartt than the Great Depression by sewing military uniforms, such as cold weather jackets for European battles in winter. The soldiers liked the Carhartt jacket for its warmth and durability during the battles. One soldier even claimed that the jacket was so durable that a German round bounced off the jacket, saving his life. When World Two was over, Hamilton Carhartt was in his mid-90s and resigned from the day-to-day operations by turning the reigns of Carhartt over to his eldest son, Vinny. 

​Custom embroidery on the Carhartt jacket craze started in 1977 when constructing the Trans Atlantic Pipeline in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Nearly every pipeline worker demanded Carhartt embroidered jackets for employee identification and, more notably, staying warm in the sub-zero temperatures of Alaska. Northwest Custom Apparels founder, Jim Mickelson, started his company also in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Jim initially worked for the Atlantic Richfield company as a project manager based out of Tacoma and worked two weeks per month in Prudhoe Bay. Jim would sell embroidered trucker caps to coworkers and other oil companies up north. Like Carhartt, the pipeline workers wanted a warm sturdy baseball cap to keep their heads warm in the arctic. 

​Carhartt is known for its industrial embroidered work jackets that construction workers find a necessity to wear on the job sites. The popular colors of Carhartt jackets are the muted earth tone brown canvas jacket. The jackets are stiff, durable, and long-lasting but difficult to hoop and embroider. Embroidery companies must use special heavy-duty locking frames that are extremely expensive and only trained operators can use. Northwest Custom Apparel's staff is trained in using the Carhartt embroidery frames and is able to frame the stiffest jacket or bag. 

By Don Fair 
P-I Reporter (1987)

Some football fanatics will pay scalpers' prices to watch Sunday's American Conference championship game in the Los Angeles Coliseum, but the cap protecting the scalp of Seattle Coach Chuck Knox is not for
sale.
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​Not even for the $100 offered yesterday by one Seahawks caller.

​Knox favors a simple, navy-blue baseball-type model with the words "Seattle Seahawks" printed in white across the front crown.

​And while several different Seahawk hats are on general sale, you need good friends on the team, not money, to wear a cap like the coach's.
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​The hat was designed by Walt Loeffler, the Seahawks' equipment manager, who has turned down a number of offers to mass market it.

​"I've been fighting it," says Loeffler. "I don't want 6.5,000 fans wearing the same hat worn by Coach Knox. I want it to be something a little special.

200 Special Caps
"I knew Knox liked hats. I didn't like the one our coaches used to wear (blue with a Seahawks logo patched on the front), so I designed this one," Loeffler said.

More than 92,000 tickets were printed for Sunday's game but Walt Loeffler, the Seahawks' equipment manager, ordered only just over 200 of these special Knox caps. Members of the coaching staff wear them.

One fan, an admirer of Knox's headgear, telephoned Seahawks headquarters yesterday and offered to pay $100 for the head coach's hat.

When told it wasn't for sale and that none is available for public purchase, the fan yelled "Go Hawks!" and hung up.

Three Seattle assistant coaches  join Knox in wearing the cap during games. They are assistant head coach Tom Prohaska, offensive coordinator Tom Catlin and backfield coach Chick Harris.

​There are five different styles of Seahawks caps available to the public. The most popular model for sale has a blue brim, a gray crown, and the team logo running along either side of the crown.

3,500 tickets gone

​Meanwhile, only 150 tickets to Sunday's game against the Raiders at home in Los Angeles are still available in the Seattle area. They are at Doug Fox Travel, and they are expected to be gone later today.

The Beginning
An American skipper who I recently fished the Bering Sea in a joint venture with the Soviets came home grinning about the way he and his cronies had surprised the foreigners with monster tows and plugged processing ships. He said the Russians were a little slow to pick up on the sharpness and fish the wisdom of the American draggers, and to strengthen his point, he whipped off his elegant sable hat and said, "Here look at this. Those guys were so lame they traded this or one of that whadda you call ems, you know," he reached for the words. "A goddamn baseball hat."

"Gimme one of those hats"
Long before baseball hats went to sea, the fertilizer, seed, and machinery salespeople in the brown dirt bible belt were passing them out to farmers. "Gimme one of those hats, will ya," was a good way to say hello to a salesman. And the salespeople, confronted with the straight-laced men in three-syllable Jesus country was glad they had the hats in a territory where their regular handouts-booze and girlie calendars-were verboten.

John Deere to Rock Stars
The hottest items on the promotional baseball hat scene for the year were from John Deere, Cat Diesel, and Ralston Purina, and the people who wore them were those who used the products the hats touted. Then about ten years ago, the hats became chic, and rock stars wore them on album covers. Since then, it's been a hat city, especially in the seafood industry. One-for-one trades are common, and processors, suppliers, and fishers' groups buy them by the gross to pass around the fleets.

Naturally, somebody has to make all those patches and hats, and in this part of the country, they come from an unassuming company on a Tacoma side street. Northwest Embroidery was started in 1977 by Jim Mickelson and Ray Roger, who knew a good thing when they saw it.

Alaska Leads to Japan
At the time, Mickelson was working for ARCO in Prudhoe Bay with a crew of 110. At the end of the stint in the arctic, Mickelson ordered hats for the whole team as keepsakes, a kind of thank-you for good service. The hates said, "Prudhoe Bay Alaska, Keep America Independent," and they were a big hit. When Mickelson tried to find a bargain for his second order - by this time, he was selling the leftovers for $5.00 apiece, and he found out that no one was manufacturing the patches in the Northwest.

Mickelson, who is a very up fellow in his late thirties, saw a hole that needed filling, " I checked all over the place about buying the equipment to stitch the patches and finally came across a Japanese company that made me an offer I couldn't refuse," Mickelson said. He had been working for the oil company for over a decade and wanted to take a chance. As his inquiries progressed, Mickelson also confirmed his plan to leave ARCO after getting the business rolling. 

"The guy from Barudan (the Japanese company) called me up when he heard I was looking around and told me to come to North Carolina to look at a typical machine in use, " Mickelson said. "I said to myself, "What the hell is this? I'm the buyer. They should come to me," but like he was reading my mind, the guy says, "You like to make money? You come down here and see this machine. We'll teach you everything you have to know, and if you go belly-up within one year, you get your money back."

Patches and Blue Jean Pockets
The machines performed as advertised, proving to be the latest technological marvels in an old traditional hand-work trade. With a punch-tape programmer and batteries of automated stitchers, a company like Northwest can simultaneously embroider dozens of patches, blue jeans pockets, or any other fabric. On the horizon, according to Mickelson, are sewing instant patches for the walk-in custom trade. In such an operation, the patch pattern and wording would be punched into a typewriter-like keyboard and transferred directly to the stitcher.

While Mickelson was discovering how to produce the hats, Ray Rogers worked some small miracles developing markets to launch the business. Mickelson and Rogers own a tape programmer and three stitchers and run the entire operations with 15 employees in two shifts. Mickelson estimates that he can turn out 150 patches per hour, and the company has taken off. "It was good right from the beginning," said Mickelson, who is building a new plant in the nearby Milton this year. "We stress quality, satisfied customers, and high-grade America-made caps. That formula has worked for us."

Quality in every Stitch
Each patch takes from 1,500 to 15,000 individual stitches to produce a design. Mickelson's tape programmer, a young man, named David Saunders, traces over a design drawn six times life-size, outlining every stitch. "If I make a mistake," Saunders said, " I have to start over from the beginning. That isn't very good. An artist can erase a mistake, but not me."

From Saunder's tracing, the computer makes a wide, perforated paper tape that calls the shots for the stitchers. A test patch is then made to check the design and the programming, and the multiple stitchers go to work. 

Jimmy Carter Shows off his Cap
Mickelson confesses that he has yet to produce a hat for Northwest Embroidery but says he's proud to have outfitted Jimmy Carter and Ted Turner. "We made two hats for Carter and destroyed the tape," Mickelson said. "They wanted it that way. The Union group sponsored his visit has one, and Carter has the other.

​"Carter was delighted with the hat," Mickelson said, "Even he is subject to the identity syndrome as I call the desire to wear logo hats." Everybody wants to be part of something. If an employer gives a person a hat, they are usually proud to wear it. That seems to double in the fishing business.