Don Boelter may deserve the credit for that. Boelter, president of Don Boelter Lithography of Hollywood, Calif., said that his firm came up with the technique in
1969 or 1970 when a local advertising agency asked its help in putting a photo of a
hot dog on the front of a T-shirt.
"It was four-color process and you can't screen print that," said Boelter. "What we
had to do was figure a way to do a lithograph and still get it to go on a shirt."
The shirt was to be a promotional item for the Tastee fast-food chain. (History
buffs, note: It was printed front and back and cost 79 cents.) Boelter found a way,
but didn't give it much more thought.
"I really didn't think much of the process," he said recently. "There weren't any
T-shirt shops then, so I didn't see any potential. I was certainly not very
far-sighted."
For more than a year, nothing happened Then, Boelter's firm engineered another
T-shirt advertising program. Soon after, the manufacturers of novelty transfers
discovered the process.
Boelter himself dates "the T-shirt boom" to as late as 1975 when more than 200,000
T-shirts were printed to promote the film, "Jaws." The following year, of course,
Factors came out with its Farrah Fawcett series, a line which sold "in the millions,"
according to Stacy Weidel, the company's director of marketing.
(According to Weidel, the company doesn't have a single Farrah transfer left."Farrah herself called me about three years ago," he said, "and wanted to know where
to get one because, apparently, she'd never gotten around to buying one. I sent her
our last two.")
Boelter added that, also about 1975, titanium oxide was added to plastisol for the
first time, thus coloring it and making it opaque. (It had previously been clear.)
This allowed transfers to be used on colored shirts for the first time.
Oh, yes, the colored shirt. According to Neal of Stedman and Moore of Union, the
first colored T's were pale blue and came with pickets. The bigger variety of colored
T-shirts, they said, did not come until the early 1970s and was a direct result of
growing demand by shirt printers and T-shirt shops.
A less noticeable development, said Neal, was the introduction of cotton-polyester
blends in T-shirts in the mid-1960s. T-shirts had previously been all cotton, he
said, but the industry's touting of polyester's wrinkle-free characteristics was its
way of acknowledging that the T was no longer just underwear.
Ironically, Neal said, the acceptance of the printed T-shirt has virtually killed the
undershirt business. The current image of the T-shirt as an outwear item and a
fashion item is now so firmly established, he said, that it almost cannot be sold as
underwear.
"Stedman's business used to be 100 percent underwear," said Neal. "Now, we're 20
percent underwear and all the rest is colored T's, most of them for the screen
printers and various T-shirt people."
Printed T-shirts bring you this week in history:
November 20, 1959
British Anglia comes to America
In 1911, the Ford Motor Company, which had been importing Ford Model Ts for several years, opened its first overseas plant at Trafford Park in Manchester, England. In 1920, after a decade of brisk sales in Britain and all over Europe, Ford was faced with a crisis--a new British law established higher tax penalties for larger-engine cars, and Ford's market share was suffering. Ford of England responded by developing several prototypes for a Ford automobile small enough to avoid British tax penalties. Designers also predicted that the citizens of dense European cities would prefer a car smaller than the standard American Ford. The resulting Model Y Ford "8" went into production in 1932, and after a strong first year Ford's British market share began to rapidly expand. In 1938, the Ford E93A Prefect was introduced, the first marque in the United States--the first British Ford to be marketed to Americans on a large scale. Internally, the compact 105E Anglia had a brand new overhead-valve engine and a four-speed gearbox, and externally, it was like nothing else on the road with it distinctive rear-sloping back window, frog-like headlights, and stylish colors: light green and primrose yellow. Despite appreciation for the well-designed car by a few automobile enthusiasts in America, the Anglia, which was a best-seller on the world's markets, failed to make a noticeable impact in the general U.S. market.
We at Printed T-Shirts thank you for visiting our site, please come back to view updates.
Heritage Advertising 4100 Bob Wallace Avenue SW Huntsville, AL 35805 Telephone:
706-374-0710 Email:
