Tunes Lead Teen/Tween Trends

Music — bands and celebrity performers — is influencing the graphics, styling and colors that teens and pre-teens want to wear.
July 31, 2009

The teen and tween demographic is perfect for the “message shirt,” as young people look to fashion to express themselves. This bold design is from American Icon Custom Apparel Screen Printing, Newburgh, N.Y.

By Deborah Sexton, Contributing Writer

If you’re ever wondering how to tap in to the teen and tween (pre-teen) market, the evidence is all around you. The apparel worn on TV, in magazines and on the Internet by rock stars, actors, models and other celebrities is going to give you the greatest clues about what teens want in decorated apparel.

According to Cody Murray, CEO, RTI Brands Inc., Bethlehem, Ga., the true trendsetter behind teen styles can be found on the radio. “Music is at the core — it’s the grease to the entire thing,” he says. “Music is an influence and inspiration.”

Murray should know, as his company creates custom apparel for touring music bands, art- and design-driven brands that sell at boutiques and department stores, as well as traditional corporate apparel.

Murray thinks that even fashion designers are influenced by music, and teenagers definitely are. “Whomever they listen to, that’s how they want to look,” he says. “It all starts there.”

Paying attention to what teenagers want can provide a big payoff if you can translate your research and observations into a winning preprint line. Jeff Gano is the merchandise and product development manager for Metal God, Phoenix, which is owned by Rob Halford, lead singer of the legendary heavy metal band Judas Priest.

“Halford has been known as the metal god and a fashion icon for metal music,” Gano says. “Now he wants to cross over to create rock-and-roll fashion.” Consequently, Gano has been sampling and testing designs for the past three months and has spent a lot of time checking out the hottest lines and edgiest retail stores.

With T-shirt price tags starting at $39.99, the teen market has the potential to be a worthwhile venture, according to Gano. At the mall, stores like Buckle, Metro Park, Hot Topic and plenty of others are stocked with various collections of multimedia T-shirts, and SKUs can be priced as high as $80.

You’ll find T-shirts in the $150-and-up range while shopping any of high-fashion boutiques in major American cities. For instance, on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, those $150-and-up T-shirts are sold in exclusive boutiques such as Fred Segal. Not only will you see the latest in cutting-edge decorated apparel at such boutiques, you also might catch a glimpse of a celebrity or two.

“If you go to the really high-end stores on Melrose, like Kitson Boutique, they have T-shirts for $400 to $500,” Gano says. And celebrity clients are wearing those exotic T-shirts in photographs and video clips splashed all over the tabloid papers and TV shows.

As many adults look for work in this difficult economy, or attempt to find other ways to pay the bills with less income, the 18-to-35-year-old demographic has far fewer responsibilities and does not seem to be getting hit as hard.

“I was reading the other day why there are shirts selling for $65 to $75 during a recession,” Gano says. “These customers are not married, don’t own a house and have disposable income. They are driving the market right now. And the teenagers get money from their parents. Another factor is the fashion world is getting more leisure minded and they are more willing to pay $75 for a really neat T-shirt instead of $200 for some other type of fashion apparel.”

What’s In a Name?
Brands also are driving the teen market. Not surprisingly, teens and tweens are extremely brand conscious, so if you want to tap this market, plan on building a brand. Examples of some of the hottest retail brands are Affliction, Ed Hardy, Christian Audigier, Aqua IV, Sinful Clothing, Crash & Burn and Glamhead.

But these brands don’t produce simple crew-neck T-shirts with a spot-color design. They are covered from seam to seam in discharge and water-based ink designs, foil, glitter, metallic ink, studs, grommets, rhinestones, flock, appliqué and other special effects.

“Christian Audigier has T-shirts that sell for $150 to $175 and one shirt will have foil, appliqué and rhinestones,” Gano says. “I would say 80% of the shirts you see in retail stores have something extra going on with them. Sometimes the design is so good it can just drive the shirt. But if the design is not extraordinary, it will have foil, flocking, appliqués and rhinestones.”

While some multimedia designs can be challenging from a production standpoint, they don’t have to be, says Lon Winters, president, Print This and Graphic Elephants, Elizabeth, Colo. “Multimedia designs at retail today don’t require the same demanding registration as those of years past,” he says. “You throw a little zigzag yarn next to a skull on a T-shirt and you’ve got yourself a winner.” In his shop, Winters is “mixing high density [inks] and foils with water-based inks.”

Some of the more adventurous multimedia efforts include an old standby: appliqué. “You might see a mineral wash black T-shirt with screen printing, embroidery and appliqué made from distressed T-shirt fabric,” Gano says.

Foils are generally used as a design accent rather than throughout a multimedia design, says Dan Holzer, co-owner, Forward Printing, Oakland, Calif. “You might see it as an outline or a background, with water-based ink printed first underneath it. Silver and gold are the most popular foils.”

Softer Is Better
The search for the softest hand — a huge trend in not only the teen market but across the board — has resulted in more printers offering discharge. “I would say right now, based on individual jobs, probably 40% of our orders are for discharge,” Murray says. “And I see increased interest in discharge printing from some of our larger customers.”

“The ‘anti-texture’ look is popular — water-based inks, discharge, whatever gives you a soft hand. People feel the shirt and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I can hardly feel the ink.’ They want a soft, subtle texture,” says Winters. Suede ink is still popular too, he says, as is almost any technique that provides a soft, subtle texture.

Gano agrees: “You are seeing a lot of discharge and a lot of reactive dyes and specialty treatments.”

Decorators also are adding texture to garments through a variety of specialty garment-dyeing techniques. Acid wash, pigment dyes, burnout, mineral wash, dip dyes, splatter dyeing; the list goes on and on. Any of these techniques provides another way to keep shirts from looking alike, and they add more visual interest.

“All the big brands like Affliction and Aqua IV are garment dyeing and then doing washes,” Gano says. “They all have different names. Some are called soil stains, mineral washes, lava wash, etc. It gives the shirt a whole different look.”

Decorators also are adding textures to shirts with the use of specialty inks. Some brands use bright colors, while others do monotone palette. “What you are seeing is someone taking a black shirt and printing a texture on it so it looks like it’s been specialty washed,” Gano says. Textures often are done in a random pattern of splatters and splotches.

Bigger is Better
Meanwhile, the new rule for design location is that there are no rules anymore — anything goes. “We’re seeing prints in different locations, running off the sides, down sleeves,” Murray says.

“This is one of the most enjoyable times to be a decorator because there are no rules,” Winters says. “For the past 20 years, a design was usually a 12-inch full front or a left chest, but in the past few years, all of that went out the window. Now you print over the seams, on the lower right back, on the left upper shoulder — anything goes.”

Designs that run across the shoulder seam and over the collar are especially tricky, Winters says. “I used to cringe when people wanted this, but we do it so often now; it’s extremely popular, even with our wholesale and corporate accounts, because they always follow retail.”

With the popularity of off-the-shirt designs, screen printers are finding they need to be innovative in how to do allover printing.

“We’re looking at a couple different systems for doing allover printing,” says Murray, “and I’m talking about multicolor allover printing, not belt printing. You’ve got your limits, but we’re looking at technology that will allow for tighter registration and cleaner prints. The good thing about allover printing is it gives us more of a design canvas to play with.”

“Everybody wants oversized prints and allover prints,” Holzer says. “We can do lots of things, but size is a limitation for us. Large belt printers are exorbitantly expensive.”

These designs are challenging for decorators because they’re often up to six colors and cover huge areas of each garment. “It requires a lot of handling to do overall printing, and they’re using a lot of adhesives and specialty inks,” Gano explains.

The Heraldry Hallmark
Industry veterans speculate that the origin of the immense popularity of heraldry graphics came from the artwork of Ed Hardy, a tattoo artist. Hardy is credited as pioneering the pop-culture “tattoos as art” decades before the worldwide boom in tattoo art that we see today.

In 2002, Hardy was approached about creating a line of clothing based on his tattoo art and a license was signed. In 2004, Christian Audigier, known for his work as head designer in the glory days of Von Dutch (remember the Von Dutch trucker’s cap?), purchased the rights to produce a high-end Ed Hardy clothing line, and a trend was born.

Since then, artists have taken this genre, which has Victorian and gothic influences, and made it their own. Heraldry designs typically incorporate a lot of scrolls, crests, insignias, crowns, fleurs de lis, banners, crosses, coats of arms, statues and the like. These elements are often combined with hearts, barbed wire, snakes, tigers, eagles, panthers, mythical animals, and lots of skulls and skeletons. Weapons such as swords, daggers and guns also are prevalent.

Heraldry artwork combined with multimedia is far and away the most popular genre among teens today. In fact, it already is creeping its way up the age bracket and is being used on apparel other than T-shirts — and that may start to erode enthusiasm for the look among younger consumers.

“In my seminars and workshops I warn people who want to learn how to do Affliction- and Ed Hardy-type designs,” Winters says. “Now that we have 40-year-old fat guys buying these shirts at Wal-Mart, you should ask yourself when the demand for that look will change [with your teen and tween customers].”

By all reports, that’s not likely this year — and maybe not next year, either. Meanwhile, it remains the hottest look out there. “Heraldry designs are a growth market for us,” says Frank Gizatullin, president, The Wild Side, San Fernando, Calif. “Customers even want the heraldry designs on button-down dress shirts, as well as on shoes and sports jackets. It’s huge; it’s the hottest thing with young adults.”

And teens do not want heraldry graphics on white shirts. “Black is the biggest [garment] color,” Murray says. “There is actually very little white. We also do some charcoals, some heathers and some trendy colors such as hues of red or green.”

Adds Mark Coudray, Coudray Serigraphics, San Luis Obispo, Calif.: “We’re seeing black, chocolate, charcoal and several of the other dark colors.”

Mark Venit, president, Apparel Graphics Institute, Ocean Pines, Md., agrees. He says he is seeing “a lot of muted colors on muted shirts — a washed-out beige or tan on light green.”

“Blacks, grays, olive greens and muted yellows are popular,” Holzer says. “When you see bright shirts, they have muted graphics.”

“If you look at Affliction, it’s definitely dark,” Winters says. “But if you look at Ed Hardy, the colors are all over the [color spectrum], especially on the ladies’ side. They are mixing in lemons and whites.” Meanwhile, attracting the teen and tween eye with designs for your custom work will still start with dark substrates. Adds Winters: “Everything is always going to have the highest contrast and look the best on black, so you do a lot of black work.”

Deborah Sexton, the former editor of Impressions, has been writing about the decorated apparel industry for 28 years. In addition to freelancing articles, she also does marketing and public relations for decorated apparel companies. For more information or to comment on this article, e-mail Deborah at dsexton@sbcglobal.net.

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In our industry we decorate a massive assortment of items by a broad variety of technologies. Then we distribute what we produce to virtually every economic sector in every nook and cranny of society.
September 14, 2009

How to Apply Foil
Editor’s note: In the following pages, the authors take you step-by-step through the process of adding foil to your T-shirt artwork. First, they detail how to incorporate foil into the workflow of an automatic press. The process differs significantly for printers using a manual press, so the authors also detail how to apply foil when printing with a manual screen printing press.
September 04, 2009

Foil Adds Sparkle and Margin 
While getting started printing with foil will be a trial-and-error process, here are some tips to reduce the learning curve. 
When we get an order at our shop, it’s not uncommon to hear an employee exclaim, “Foiled again!” That’s because as many as 15% of our orders involve some kind of foil printing, making the process somewhat of a specialty for our shop — Forward Printing, Oakland, Calif.
September 03, 2009