Storied Shirts of Glark - Interview with Glarkware

The relatively-new-to-Spreadshirt.com partner Glarkware is no newbie to the t-shirt universe. His almost daily re-introduction of designs and addition of new gems are almost sure to induce a spout of laughter or brow-raising. As the slogan “Storied Shirt Jobbery” forewarns, each of Glarkware’s shirts is coupled with witty, ironic, informative and entertaining stories. Dave, the man behind Glarkware and the numerous other Glark Industries pursuits, talks about his move to Spreadshirt, gives us a quick lesson on Canadian pronunciation and graces us with his good-humoured nature. The interview with Dave from Glarkware:

Where are you from and where do you live now?
My hometown is a little place called Thorold which is near Niagara Falls but I’ve lived in Toronto, Los Angeles and I’m currently calling New York City home.

What do you do, other than t-shirts?
I’ve gone through a few careers since the 90s. I ran my own interactive agency (as we used to call them back then) doing website design and online marketing and work there led to a few vanity projects which took on a life of their own. The biggest of these was a TV recap site called Television Without Pity which we ran for almost 10 years before selling it to NBC. I’ve recently taken up photography which has been really fun.

How did you come up with the name Glark?
A friend of mine from university used to do a comic called Blik which was full of weird made up names and sounds. When it came time to choose a handle (more 90s talk!) for my online a-doings I aped his style and came up with something in that vein that didn’t appear on any search engines (though it has since become a name of a unix script… stupid eggheads!)

How long have you been designing t-shirts?
Wow, I guess about 10 years now. I started designing stuff for a friend’s wholesale apparel business back during the fake retro businesses shirt craze (remember that?) and had some stuff appear in stores like Urban Outfitters.

What is the difference between American and Canadian t-shirt culture?
Well, in Canada we called them shiurts. Other than that it’s about the same except Americans don’t understand all our references to Timbits and giggle way too much when we tell them how to correctly pronounce Regina.

When and why did you move to Spreadshirt?
In May 2009. Back in Toronto we would pick up stock from the local printer, we turned the 3rd floor of our house into a warehouse for shirts and we went to the post office every day after packing orders in the morning. Now we’re in New York City and living in an apartment the size of a postage stamp so that way of doing business would have cramped our style a bit. Now with Spreadshirt handling production and fulfillment it has really given me more time to design new stuff and start new projects.

What is your shop’s target group and how do you market your shop to them?
I think we have a lot of pop culture-minded people following us from the Television Without Pity days and I still have ads running there thanks to my Jedi negotiating skills, but it’s mostly been word of mouth. One of the great things about partnering with Spreadshirt is that I’ve finally had time to start drawing up an expanded marketing plan. I feel like such a grown-up now.

What do you like about Spreadshirt and what could we do better?
I like not having to worry about. We are a small outfit by design and sometimes there were not enough hours in the day to keep up. Passing on responsibilities to a trusted partner to free up time to concentrate on design and marketing has been a godsend. I would like to see more shirt colour choices and colour parity between men’s and women’s shirts of the same make (e.g. American Apparel).

Where do you get your ideas for designing? What happens before a shirt lands on your site?
Almost everything just happens organically. I’ll be watching TV with my wife and some snarky comment becomes the start of a conversation that leads to a shirt design. There’s a shirt on the site called “Swedish Mafia: Efficient But Deadly” that was born when a friend from Chicago couldn’t figure out how his local Swedish bakery was getting rid of so many horrible baked goods every day. We knew the answer. It’s was obviously a mob front.

What’s your favourite shirt?
Oh man. I’m not going to do that thing where I say I can’t choose just one. I hate that. I’m going with Bigfoot vs. Abe Lincoln because I’m a big fan of both Abraham Lincoln and the ridiculous.

Have you ever seen a stranger wearing one of your shirts? What did you do?
Since I’ve moved to NYC I see them all the time. This is Glarkware Central! I will stop you and give you a long awkward hug and without explaining myself I gently whisper in your ear “thank you my friend” and walk away.

Where are your favourite stomping grounds on the world wide web?
I’m always on Flickr.com looking for inspiration for my photography. Following up on the Bigfoot vs. Abe Lincoln shirt, there’s a couple webcomics I really enjoy these days. The Abominable Charles Christopher is absolutely amazing and Thinkin’ Lincoln is right up my alley. I also run a site called Damn Hell Ass Kings that collects stuff from all our talented friends.

Following your slogan “Storied Shirt Jobbery”, each of your shirts has a story behind it. Why?
All our shirts really do have a story behind them. They all started life as some toss-away remark or weird idea and we try to capture something of that in the copy.

Do you really love irony?
That’s a typo. We love ironing.

Glarkware is bringing out new shirts every day, what do you have up your sleeve in the coming months for Glarkware?
Right now we’re reintroducing a lot of classic Glarkware designs including many redesigns. Once we’re done with that we’ve got some great new stuff ready to roll out and as fall approaches we’ll break out the hoodies.

If you were a t-shirt, what would you look like?
Medium. White.

Many thanks to Dave for the interview and …