international standard tshirt number
I love tshirts. I love geek tshirts. Never am I happier than when explaining that “no, in the context of the Tshirt 10 means 2, not 10″ or “the wee arrow means greater than“. Or “no, it’s not just an arbritrary orange, it’s a software company logo“. One of the problems with these Tees is that they wear out, get solder burned, or get toasted to a half sized crisp in the dryer.
Ordering a fresh one should be easy. But it isn’t. You look inside the average Tshirt and this is what you get:
Useful. Threadless get closer with this:
Books have the ISBN. Tshirts should have a ISTN. A standardised system for organising tshirt designs. It would make tshirt searching so much easier. I propose a 4 part system limited to 16 characters.
TGEK-BINP-MBAA-XL
producer - design - item - size
thinkgeek - binary people - mens black - extra large
The first and last sections are standardised. So you always know where it was bought and what size it was. The central two parts are self managed by the producer. They get to name the design, and use whatever code suits them for the item.
One spin off I can foresee is a subtle sleeve or back of neck print of the producer code on the shirt. So that when I see a shirt on the street I can just glance at the sleeve and note “right, he got that shirt from GYOI! - must check them out”. Benefits the shop, benefits me in finding a new shirt, clutters up my sleeve a little.
Some central area, nothing more complicated than a wiki, could allow producers to claim a producer code and then optionally maintain a list of design codes on that site. This would have promotional advantages, and would help them to show they were first with a design when they get ripped off on cafepress forty times.
Adding structure to the chaotic world of t-shirts. Hardly an earth shattering global innovation, but would be cool. Comment if you want to reserve a cool 4 letter acronym!
The sketch
(May I apologise for the quality of photography. I seriously need a new flash!)
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4 Responses to “international standard tshirt number”
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Steve invents things while travelling to work on the train. He sketches them in his moleskine notebooks. Instead of actually making them (and becoming a billionaire overnight) he posts them here for the good of mankind.
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[...] cool idea posted on inventoids.com about a way to standardise Tshirt naming - making reordering easier. Vastly complex, but quite a [...]
Dibs on ‘FABO’ if this ever comes to fruition! Seems like a pretty good idea to me, the largest problem in terms of reording being that there often comes a time when a particular design becomes unavailable forever. I would also make one minor modification, which would be to make the size portion optional, as long as the size is displayed somewhere else on the t-shirt; printing a different ‘ISTN’ for each size could become cost prohibitive, especially for smaller t-shirt companies.
Hi Joe, thanks for the feedback.
Consider ‘FABO’ reserved. Looking at the post again, I think you are probably right, dropping the size element would simplify things. Item should probably drop too. One potential problem is that a lot of the Tshirts I buy online have the tags removed (why I have no clue).
Yeah, the only time ‘item’ would be necessary would be if a design were printed on multiple styles/in multiple colorways. But that information could be subsumed under the design letters.
And I think they remove the tags to make their product look less cheap and to disassociate it from whatever manufacturer made their blanks.