In Bold Contrast to High Street Fashion - Teknique in Interview

A relatively new Spreadshirt shop with a lot of potential has gotten off to a great start. Teknique takes a house music approach to t-shirt design, mixing colourful apparel with even more strikingly colourful designs to create a really bold shirt. Read about the man behind the scenes, his approach to design, his thoughts about Spreadshirt and about t-shirt culture in the UK. Our interview with Richie from Teknique:

Where are you from?
I’m from Leicester which is pretty much the centre of the UK. After doing a multimedia design course here I pretty much made it my home. Or to look at it another way, I was too lazy to move.

What do you do when you are not designing t-shirts?
I spend the rest of my time in my studio creating house music as part of DJ/Producer duo, Dirty Secretz. I can’t stand to be doing something uncreative so spend most of my time making things, whether it be a t-shirt design or a new track. And if I’m not there, I’m out at the clubs playing the music and wearing the t-shirts!

How long have you had a t-shirt shop?
The Teknique store has only been open about 7 weeks now but I’ve used Spreadshirt for years. I first started using it for merchandise I was asked to do for a car club I belonged to. Then when I formed Dirty Secretz we used it as a store for selling t-shirts with our logo. However, I kept coming up with t-shirt design ideas that I couldn’t really put in the merchandise store so the Teknique brand was born. Don’t ask where the name came from, still can’t remember.

What do you think about the t-shirt culture in the UK?
I think there is a very poor t-shirt culture here in the UK, mainly dominated by high street chains pumping out poor t-shirts or large brands putting out expensive t-shirts with the same design in a million different colours. It’s almost a culture of lazy design, not too focused on individuality. Most shops are putting out retro t-shirts as ideas have run out. However, online shops have helped bring this individuality back and with services like your own, I can only see this getting better as more new ideas come through.

What do you do to market your shop to your target group?
Most of the marketing for the shop comes through free services like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. After spending years marketing myself through these sites for music reasons, using them for Teknique just seemed like the logical thing. The market is pretty much the same so they help each other out, as where I market one, the other one will also be tied in.

You are a DJ. What kind of music are you into and what does it have to do with shirts?
Well at the core I’m a house music man and a load of the t-shirts in the store reflect this with lines from classic house tracks or designs that praise the genre. Being a DJ also means I’m at the heart of a club, often with many clubbers looking at me so what I wear has to make a statement. Being able to make my own designs that say what I want to say is a great release.

What do you like about Spreadshirt and what could we do better?
I think the thing I love most about Spreadshirt is the fact that you guys handle all the complicated bits freeing me up to spend my time being creative. The fact you can just run off one t-shirt of a design without any setup cost is fantastic and really means a design can be out there and bought instantly! What I would like to see is some of the features from the Marketplace put into the shops. Like designs with more than one colour variation are shown as one item within the market place with cool little arrow icons to switch between the colours. Also, rolling over an image allows you to see the design coloured and up close. At the moment each of my designs is available in at least 4 colour variations so there’s pages and pages of products so it would be good to reduce this. One other thing would be to be able to print the designs larger on the shirts. I’d love to make designs that practically fill the print space on a t-shirt with a big bold design.

Have you ever seen a stranger wearing one of your shirts?
Well as the store has only been up for a short time, there haven’t been many sales locally but thanks to the Marketplace, I’ve had orders from all over the world. The Marketplace is a really great idea as there’s some great designs from people all over the world all in the same place.

What is your favourite t-shirt design and what is the story behind it?
I think my favourite design from the store would be the ‘Drop Tha Beat‘ t-shirt. It’s actually the name of our latest track and whilst doing some promotion material for it, I just decided to put it on a t-shirt. I really experimented with the colours on it as well and it was the first one I did that was printed in 3 colours. The black version uses both the neon pink and yellow which practically glow in any light and look great in the club.

How much time do you spend working on your shop?
I probably spend a few hours a week just coming up with designs but I’ll check the store several times a day, along with promoting it on Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. It changes from day to day though, depending on how many ideas I have floating around my head.

How do you approach t-shirt design and which programme do you use?
Illustrator is my program of choice for coming up with designs as you can get an idea down quite quickly in there. As most of the t-shirts are slogan based, I usually start with picking the right font and adjusting the text. This is the critical part for me as many t-shirt designs are ruined by the wrong font or style it’s done in. After I have the initial design down I’ll then tweak it to make it more unique. That part usually takes the longest and sometimes I’ll just come back to the original as simple designs are often the most effective I find.

Where do you get inspiration for your shirts?
I get my inspiration from everywhere really. I’ll be out somewhere and I’ll just have an idea which might be inspiration from a design I’ve seen, music lyrics or even just something somebody said. High street fashion is often a good place to get inspiration from as the t-shirt prints are usually a good idea but often in a terrible font or just gone about wrong. So I’ll take that and try and do it better.

Where do you see your shop in 5 years?
Well I’m hoping I’ll still have time to be adding designs at least weekly to the shop so by then I’ll probably have 100s of designs to choose from which I think is important. Many of the high street fashion shops sell a very limited range of designs so everyone seems to wear the same. With my store, I wanted to create more designs, more choice, and hopefully there will be enough designs and variations to make sure everyone has their own style and favourites.

If you were a t-shirt, what would you look like?
Simple and bold.

What have you always wanted to be asked and what is the answer?
Do you find it hard looking almost identical to Justin Timberlake? To that my answer would be ‘No’.