Behind the Raucus: Garment Selection

 Quick question for you:

If you think you have an amazing design that's crisp and the color selection is great, why would you print it on a sub par medium?

To save costs?

At Raucus, we don't believe in cutting corners.  Sure we can get Gildans or Hanes Beefy Tees for under a dollar a pop and make a killing on the mark up, but we don't do it for two reasons.

1) We have more pride in ourselves than that.

2) That's a shit thing to do to you guys.

That's like throwing an orange peel in a bag of schwag and calling it Orange Crush...or so I'm told.  To put it another way you're charging a premium price for an inferior product.  We don't play that way here.

So for our first run, after massive fucking research, we've selected the best blanks around.  The winners were American Apparel and Alternative Apparel.  Sure they may cost a lot more, but fuck me if they aren't the best garments around.  We'll detail each different garment used in our first run below: 



American Apparel Fine Jersey Cotton Tee

Our logo crews come in three different fabrics by American Apparel.  The first being American Apparel's fine jersey cotton crew neck tee.  This shirt is the benchmark for great fitting, great looking, durable tees.  Plus with 47 colors to choose from, there's a color for any design.

American Apparel Organic Fine Jersey Cotton Tee

When it came to picking our organic logo crew shirt it was clear as black and white, like a fat panda.  American Apparel once again sets the standard with their organic cotton tees.  We chose the organic fabric because it's more durable and we all know how hard it is to keep white and black tees looking fresh after multiple uses and washes. 

American Apparel Poly Cotton Tee

For our discharge print we wanted a garment that would that would have a vintage feel and also test out a different printing method.  So we went with the American Apparel Poly-Cotton. (50% Cotton / 50% Polyester)  This fabric is sooooooo soft, it's ridiculous.

Because the garment is 50% polyester the discharge printing method we went with allowed us to achieve a worn, vintage effect on a brand new shirt. (discharge only holds ink on cotton fabric, therefore it will fade a bit from having polyester in the garment)  We'll go more in-depth on our printing techniques and choices in the next 'Behind the Raucus' segment.  We chose the color asphalt because we like how the dark grey color really allowed the white and cyan inks we printed with to pop and contrast with the garment nicely.

Alternative Apparel V-gan Organic V-Neck Tee

Finally, we chose to go with Alternative Apparel for our V-Necks.  In our opinion they make the best in the business.  We went with their V-gan Organic V-Neck, which is a 40's 100% organic cotton short sleeve v-neck.  The garments are low-impact fabric dyed and enzyme fabric washed for a super soft hand.

We hope this segment is helpful to you and also allows you some insight into our world here at Raucus.  We'll be back next week with a segment all about our printing styles and techniques.  So, until then cheers...and remember to medicate daily.

Cody