For years people have been asking you, “Where did you get that amazing t-shirt?” and you’ve been telling them, “Cotton Bureau. It’s where I get all my shirts.” purely from the goodness of your heart because you love your friends and you love Cotton Bureau even though there’s absolutely nothing in it for you.

While we’re incredibly grateful for the kind words and your generosity of spirit, we think no good deed should go unrewarded. That’s why starting today we’ve got a simple way for you to get a little something for the spectacular work you’re already doing.

Cotton Bureau Referral Codes Are Here. 🤝

If you have a Cotton Bureau account, check out your discounts page. You’ll see a private code (just for you) and a public code (for everyone else). Copy and paste that public code somewhere you can easily find it. Then, any time you mention Cotton Bureau, casually drop that sucker right in the middle of the conversation. For every new customer that buys an on demand shirt, hat, or phone case, you’ll get $5 you can use for anything on the site. Your friends will get $5 off their order and — for the next two weeks only — free shipping*.

When you’re ready, redeem your referrals to cover up to 100% of your order, including shipping. Just select the items you want to order and use your private code at checkout. You can review the total number of referrals you’ve made and the size of your discount from inside your account.

Do note, your private discount can only be used one time. Once used, a new private code will be generated. Any balance left over from the old one will be destroyed. Maximum earnable discount is $250 every three months.

You said something about prizes? 🥇

Wait! Before you go booking the nearest skywriter, updating your MySpace profile, and printing your referral code across your chest (people are going to ask a lot of questions already answered by your shirt), you should know that during the introductory period, we’re keeping track of who refers the most new customers to Cotton Bureau. We’ll be awarding a grand prize to the person who has the most successful referrals. We’ll also be handing out prizes to the runners up (second and third place) as well as smaller gifts to three winners that will be randomly selected from everyone who makes at least one referral by the end of the day Thursday, July 27, 2023.

Keep your eye on the Back Room blog and the @cottonbureau Threads account. We’ll be sharing anonymized leaderboard updates each day.

Here’s the initial prize list to kick things off:

Grand Prize: iPad 10th Generation
First Prize: AirPods Pro
Second Prize: Ninja Creami
Additional Prizes: Cotton Bureau Metal Card, Teva Hurricane XLT2 (2)

If we hit 100 referrals in the first two weeks, we’ll upgrade that iPad to an iPad Pro and throw in another pair of Tevas for good measure. (Additional stretch goals to follow if we happen to blow that number out of the water.)

Ready? Find your personal codes — including balance and usage — by logging in to your account and visiting the “Discounts” section.

Okay, go get ‘em.

Pro tip: click the discount code from your account to generate a URL to share. Anyone using that URL will have your discount applied automatically at checkout.

*International orders get 50% off shipping, like always.

There’s a strangeness to sitting down to write an email celebrating 10 years of Cotton Bureau. It’s difficult, or maybe impossible, to express the gratitude you feel towards the people who have been a part of the last decade of your life… employees, customers, partners, investors, collaborators, family, friends.

It’s equally challenging to describe the process of getting to here, wherever here is. It doesn’t happen all at once — launching, growing, exploding, shrinking, crashing, recovering, pivoting, steadying, evolving, expanding — yet it’s all somehow compressed, like traveling through a wormhole to the future, watching the present stream by.

Just yesterday, we were enthusiastically sketching out plans for kickstarting pre-order t-shirt campaigns and pitching potential names on an 8' wide glass marker board. Now we’re… a company with that has shipped nearly a million stickers, pins, notebooks, pens, posters, hats, mugs, phone cases, sweatshirts, tank tops, buttons, pajamas, totes, coins, towels, socks, wristbands, pillows, glasses, etc. to more than 100,000 people? Someone explain this to me.

The history of Cotton Bureau contains many firsts. The first conversation. The first tweet. The first comp. The first commit. The first submission. The first sale. The first shirt off the presses. The first dollar in the bank. Some of those firsts happened in December 2012, in our first real office on Smallman St, when Cotton Bureau was conceived. Some happened in March of 2013 when we began inviting designers and made the first public announcement that we had a new project up our sleeve. The big one though, the birth of Cotton Bureau, happened 10 years ago today.

On June 12, 2013 an email six months in the making blipped across the internet to 652 inboxes announcing that Cotton Bureau — a curated, crowd-funded t-shirt community for designers — was open for business. Some of you opened that email (489 if the stats are to be believed). Thank you for sticking around, and for telling a few of your friends about us too. Today’s anniversary email will be viewed by a humbling multiple of that number.

It’s risky and likely foolish to look to us for lessons on how to run a business. We’ve made mistakes, plenty of which could have and should have meant the end. Still, there is something to be said for showing up, doing the work, and enduring. Good things happen when you care.

Having now witnessed many companies come and go (including more than a few that we admired deeply), we’re grateful for the opportunity to continue working with tremendous designers and communities. It is a privilege. The people we’ve teamed up with that we never dreamed would answer our emails is too long to list, and singling any of them out feels wrong. Whatever success we have had is due in large part to their generous participation.

Many people have been thanked privately, but I would like to extend a special thank you to friend, co-founder, and designer emeritus Jay Fanelli. There would not be a Cotton Bureau without you.

And now for the cake and presents. It wouldn’t be a birthday if we didn’t have some fun.

First of all, get free shipping on all products using the code HBDCB10 at checkout for the next 10 days. (Fine print: free shipping for U.S. only, 50% off international shipping.)

Second, we have several brand new Cotton Bureau designs to share, including two limited time only pre-order campaigns.

There’s our 10th Birthday Logo Tee, designed by our good friend Virginia Poltrack. The classic Cotton Bureau logo is aged and a little overgrown now, but it feels like home.

We also have a special felt appliqué logo sweatshirt in mauve, heather navy, and dark grey heather. Perfect for evening fires and staying inside all year long.

As we are expanding our on demand offerings, we put together a Cotton Bureau logo dad hat and logo tote. We’ve also got Cotton Bureau notebooks for good measure.

Finally, and this is the big one, we have a very special 10th birthday product… Cotton Bureau Metal Cards. A fantastic souvenir for anyone who loves Cotton Bureau + free shipping on all Cotton Bureau orders for a year. It’s a steal. (Order quickly. These cards are sequentially numbered to 200 and extremely limited edition.)

Weighing in at pleasingly hefty 27g, these precisely milled stainless steel cards measure 89mm x 50mm x 1mm with 5mm smoothly radiused edges. The front features the Cotton Bureau badge and wordmark along with the year 2023 A.D. in Roman numerals, while the obverse proudly displays your exclusive serial number and our heartfelt appreciation for your support as a friend of Cotton Bureau.

Tongue-in-cheek message on the back notwithstanding, every Cotton Bureau Metal card includes free shipping (good for 12 months from the date of purchase) as well as automatic entry into any/all Cotton Bureau giveaways for one year, including our 10th birthday celebration.

Your Cotton Bureau Metal Card and associated benefits are renewable annually. Reserved for the truly committed, the Cotton Bureau Metal Card is a weighty symbol of your patronage. Who knows what other good things may come to those who possess one.

If that wasn’t enough, there are prizes. All orders in the next 10 days using the code HBDCB10 are eligible to win one of the following:

A MICRO Soft Shell wallet from slimfold.

MagLock sunglasses from Distil Union.

A limited edition iridescent purple Mark One pen from Studio Neat.

A pair of Amber Rocks Glasses from Manual.

A Pen Type-C from CW & T.

And the grand prize, a Time Since Launch from our friends at CW & T. What better way to celebrate a milestone of your own in the future.

If you’d like to get in on the prizes without purchasing, please send a birthday card to us. We promise we’ll read them all.

Cotton Bureau
6425 Living Pl
Unit 200
Pittsburgh, PA 15206

Thank you all for your support. Here’s to another five, 10, 15, or 20 years of Cotton Bureau.

Every time you visit the Cotton Bureau home page or a product page or pretty much any page on the website, what you are actually looking at when you see a t-shirt is a carefully rendered mockup. The artwork (the design file you gave us) is layered over (and sometimes under) a series of other images to display a photorealistic composite that, we hope, matches what you and your customers ultimately receive in the mail after it has been printed.

When we started Cotton Bureau in 2013 (more about that next month!), that entire process took place in Photoshop. We took photos of blank shirts, then painstakingly separated the shapes, shadows, and highlights into separate layers. Every new shirt we added to the site was hand-edited to look great. It was also, as you can imagine, quite slow. As we added more shirt styles, the time to set up each new product naturally increased. We built tools; we automated; we eventually made the entire procedure self-serve — which is what you see when you go to submit a new product today.

Even at the small scale that Cotton Bureau operates at, you are still talking about hundreds of thousands of images today and likely millions of images in the near future. Each product typically has several colors, materials, and styles. Those images also then need to be served at device-appropriate resolutions. Altogether, that’s a lot of files, each of which are generated at the time of product creation then stored on servers all over the world to be displayed as quickly as possible when they are requested.

Clearly we’ve outgrown a few people on laptops cranking out mockups in Photoshop. What we have also outgrown thanks to the cost of storing and fetching all those images on all those servers is pre-generating every single needed file at the time of product creation that might ever be needed. With phone cases joining shirts last year (and hats and other new products on their way), we couldn’t wait any longer to create a new system.

The central premise of Cotton Bureau in 2013 is still the same today: try not to make something before you need it. That applies to images just as much as it applies to t-shirts. The cost of making and storing images is a lot lower than making and storing t-shirts, but the scale is a lot greater. What if we generated images just in time instead of (in computer terms) way, way ahead of time? If we did that, we could reduce the number of images we are storing (caching) from 100% to 10% or 1% or… 0.1%?

There’s no free lunch, of course. Now we’ll be paying more to generate images and less to store them, but overall we expect to see significant savings by migrating images away from Amazon and Imgix to our main servers (Linode).

Will you notice any of this? We hope not. We’ll be moving to the new system in stages over the next few months. If all goes according to plan, the website will look and feel the same.

But. All of that is relatively uninteresting and technical. Are there any other benefits? Yes! Because product images were all pre-rendered, changing any of the underlying assets meant massive re-renders across all site products. Adding colors and styles was quite painful. There is a plan — exacting timing is still very much tbd, though we are targeting 2023 —to start introducing additional non-core brands and styles (and completely new product types) as we are able to source and validate. That should result in increased flexibility for everyone in finding just the right garments.