How It’s Made

Why we make things one order at a time

The cost is time. A made-to-order item has to be produced before it can even be handed to a carrier — a few days for a printed tee, up to two weeks for a boxed game that is printed, collated and packed. A warehouse could have shipped it the same afternoon.

What we get in return is worth the wait:

• Nothing is destroyed. The apparel industry burns and buries enormous quantities of unsold stock every year. We cannot have unsold stock, because we do not make anything twice.
• Designs can be strange. A design that will sell forty copies is worth releasing when there is no minimum print run to justify. Those forty people usually love it far more than four thousand people would like something safe.
• Personalization is possible. A name, a date, a photograph, an inside joke — none of that works if the item was made before we knew who it was for.

Apparel and drinkware

Shirts, hoodies and sweatshirts are printed on blank garments sourced from apparel mills, using direct-to-garment or direct-to-film printing depending on the artwork and the fabric. Mugs, tumblers and bottles are printed by sublimation, which bonds the ink into the coating instead of sitting on top of it.

Printed apparel should be washed inside out, cold, and either tumble dried low or hung to dry. Skip the iron on the print itself. Treated that way, a print outlasts the garment.

Coins, models and figures

Commemorative coins are struck from metal blanks and finished by hand, then checked individually. Models and figures are cast or printed in resin, cleaned up, and hand-finished where the design calls for it.

These are the items where small differences between pieces are most visible. A hand-finished edge, the exact depth of an antiqued recess, a faint seam where a mold closed — those are characteristics of the process, not faults. A piece with a chip, a crack or a missing element is a fault, and we will replace it.

Board games and advent calendars

Boxed items are the slowest things we make, because a game or a calendar is not one object. Boards, cards, tokens, inserts and the box itself are each produced, then collated and packed by hand, and each piece is checked before the box is closed.

Expect these to sit at the longer end of our production estimate. Advent calendars in particular are dated products with a hard deadline, so we publish an order-by date for them each season and we recommend treating it as real.

Where your order is made

Every design is drawn in-house in the United States. The making of it — printing, finishing and packing — is handled by our manufacturing partners, who produce each piece only after it is ordered. Blank goods come from a mix of domestic and overseas manufacturers, which is normal for this industry.

What a made-to-order item will and will not be

Product photographs on this site are a mix of real photography and digital mockups used to show a design clearly. Small differences between the image and the item you receive are normal and come from screen calibration, lighting, fabric texture, the printing or engraving method, and how artwork sits on a particular size.

Reasonable variation looks like:

• A color slightly warmer or cooler than it appeared on your screen
• Print placement varying a little between sizes
• Texture and finish differing between fabric types
• Small hand-finishing differences between two copies of the same collectible

Whereas these are faults, and we will fix them:

• Cracked, peeling or incomplete printing
• The wrong design, size, color or personalization
• Damage in transit
• Missing components from a boxed item

If you land in the second list, email [email protected] with your order number and photographs and we will replace or refund it.

Why designs disappear

Seasonal designs are retired when their season ends, and they do not come back. That is deliberate. A Halloween design that is still for sale the following April was never really a Halloween design.

If something you want is listed as a limited run, take that at face value. We would rather disappoint someone in March than sell a gift that stopped meaning anything in November.