When you’re born in the 1980s in Pittsburgh, your grandfather was probably a steelworker or a farmer. Maybe you had one of each. Either way, the idea was the same. You wake up, early, and you put your time in. The work goes in one side, the product comes out the other. Day after day, week after week, year after year.

Cotton Bureau is the direct result — and, we hope, an ongoing legacy — of that ethos. Show up. Work hard. Do it again.

So it is with pride that we recognize the anniversary of the day we launched 13 long years ago and our Steel City heritage.

As part of the celebration, we’re offering two incredible deals.

FIRST, get our annual birthday t-shirt design, available in Basic ($13) and Deluxe ($20).

SECOND, select an on demand tee of your choice, again for an unfathomably low $13.

PLUS, get 10% off all additional on demand products. Use code LUCKY13 at checkout.

This year’s birthday tee is designed by local friend and artist Daniel Gurwin.

Both designs are screen-printed with water-based inks to last forever and feel great and are available one week only for the low, low price of $13.

The basic tee features a simple, 3" wide pocket print with our name, location, and date of establishment. Available in your choice of white, natural, light grey, and charcoal styles.

It’s the perfect way to show your support for Cotton Bureau without inviting any questions not already answered by your shirt.

The Deluxe version adds a large back print which showcases a Cotton Bureau seal plus a discreet woven hem tag on the front. Slightly more expensive at $20 but still a bargain.

Perfect for the true believer who wants, nay needs, friends and family alike to know where the finest quality apparel may be found.

Don’t forget by using code LUCKY13 at checkout, all Cotton Bureau customers are entitled to one on demand tee (or tank top for maximum summer vibes) of your choosing — again for the thematically requisite low, low price of $13.

Our entire on demand catalog is eligible as part of this promotion. Deal ends in one week on Friday, June 19.

At our normal retail price of $32, we don’t even want to calculate the percentage discount we’re talking about. (The Finance Department would shut this deal down immediately if they knew.)

FINALLY, as a further thank you for your long-standing support, we’re discounting all additional on demand products by 10%, so load up that cart with as many shirts as you can fit. There’s no limit to how much you can save.

Just make sure you use the code LUCKY13 at checkout.

Last year our friends at DuckDuckGo approached us about teaming up to offer a line of t-shirts and other merch. Earlier this week the first round of items dropped including the Dark Mode tee featuring erstwhile DuckDuckGo mascot Dax in striking black-on-black.

To kick off our new partnership, we hallucinated an entire interview with Duck.ai which we are presenting below. Just kidding, we fired off a few questions via email to learn more about why they chose to work with Cotton Bureau and what might be next.

Hello! Thanks for taking a few minutes to chat about the recent DuckDuckGo / Cotton Bureau collaboration. As privacy-valuing users and paying subscribers to Duck.ai (thank you for adding device sync, btw), we’re big fans of what you all have been doing lately. Add to that our long-standing admiration for your principled approach to running a business, and we can honestly say it’s a privilege for us to finally be teaming up on this new line of shirts and other merch.

Would you mind telling us a little bit about this collaboration?

Thank you, that's very kind. At DuckDuckGo, our mission has always been to raise the standard of trust online, helping people protect their privacy across browsing, search, email, and AI. This collaboration is an extension of that mission into the physical world. We partnered with Cotton Bureau because you share our values: care, quality, and respect for the people who use their products.

Well, shucks, thank you. We couldn’t agree more, and it’s gratifying to see the effort we have put in over the last decade plus translate into opportunities like this.

So, why does a search engine / private browser / AI chat anonymizer want to sell t-shirts and other things? Surely you have your hands full already.

Millions of people have made the choice to use DuckDuckGo every day, and we wanted to give them a way to wear that choice proudly and with quality. It's a fun way to celebrate the people who have championed DuckDuckGo over the years. A shirt becomes an everyday signal that privacy matters and that there's a community of people who believe the same. We've always thought privacy is something worth wearing on your sleeve, so we figured we'd make that literal.

Well said. But, be honest, was this all Dax's idea? It’s at least a little bit loony.

As you can imagine, Dax is extremely private. So private, in fact, that not much is known about him. Even we struggle to keep up. But we've heard through the duckweb he's very excited about this collaboration. Let's just say he may or may not be the de facto creative director around here (among many other roles he prefers to keep under the radar).

Will there be more product collaborations in the future? We understand Dax is notoriously private, but surely he can give us a hint or may be a portentous nod.

There is no need to be private about supporting privacy. We look forward to more collabs in the future!

In addition to maintaining a shadowy persona, we know Dax and the rest of the team are busy, so we’ll try to wrap this up quickly. DuckDuckGo is famous for protecting users’ privacy. Does donning the Dark Mode tee offer similar protection in real life? Would one be immune from, say, identity thieves and malicious snoopers with long-range microphones like they use in the movies to listen to your conversations?

You’ll have to download our app for that! Which you should absolutely do.

Done! While we’re a little bit disappointed the t-shirt doesn’t come with superpowers, we knew it was a long shot. We’ll let you go now so Dax can get back to his life of fighting crime optimizing search and keeping you safe online. Thank you so much for your time!

P.S. You can view the entire set of collaborations on DuckDuckGo, including the svelte all-black Atoms and the spy-grade DuckDuckGo Yubikey.

Whether you call it a beanie, a toque, a winter hat, or a tossle cap (the only right answer), you can now call it yours on Cotton Bureau.

Available in 18 delicious colors to keep your ears warm, our beanies are 100% hypoallergenic acrylic and constructed from an extra dense knit, ideal for embroidered applications. One size fits all, but expect it to feel snug if your head is on the larger side.

As with hats and shirts, please keep our embroidery guidelines in mind. Thread colors are limited to our standard palette. Max size is 3.75" wide by 2.25" tall. Stay away from small details that may be difficult to execute. If you have any questions, ask us. We’re happy to help.

Now it’s your turn. Can you crack our list of favorites?

In addition to launching on demand embroidered beanies, we found time here in early 2026 to make some much needed improvements to site performance. We migrated servers in January (did you notice?), leaving our long, long time host Linode for something with significantly higher performance per dollar. Linode was a fantastic partner for the entire life of Cotton Bureau and we can still recommend them for fantastic reliability and user experience, but times have changed and so have we. Our needs have increased over the years. To keep costs in check, we had to find something else.

If you’re curious, we ultimately decided to switch to Vultr after reviewing our options. (Link is an affiliate code since why not. Get $300 in server credits when you sign up.) We’ve been more than happy with the service. We doubled our CPU, increased storage by 350%, and added over 6X the RAM. So far, so good. Everything is faster for a very modest increase in our monthly server bill. 

Image Rendering

Beyond hardware improvements, we put most of our effort in February toward making smarter choices about how and when to render images. Since moving from pre-rendering to dynamic rendering in 2023, latency on our product and gallery pages due to slow image loading has been one of our biggest frustrations. Thankfully, with a combination of more sophisticated caching and de-duplication, our most frequently accessed products now load instantly in most cases.

More Updates

While we have a lengthy list of features and products we still intend to bring to Cotton Bureau, there is an equally long list of neglected parts of the site that desperately need our attention. To that end, a big focus for us in 2026 is building a smoother and more polished experience across the board. We’ve got bugs to squash and optimizations to make, and it’s already started. Bulk image downloading for created products is back. Pre-order campaign sales figures can now be optionally hidden. Shop navigation has been improved. Altogether, hundreds of small changes have been made to streamline operations and user experience.

The Future

We have one major quality of life feature in progress right now, though we’re not sure exactly when it will drop. Currently our best estimate is April. All I can say at the moment is that we may finally be able to resolve an issue going that goes all the way back to the beginning of Cotton Bureau on demand apparel, and we couldn’t be more excited.