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.

It’s National Parks Week, and there’s no better way to celebrate than with a new tee from the Cotton Bureau NPS collection. Whether your favorite park is Acadia, Shenandoah, Yosemite, or Zion, we’ve got a shirt for you.

By the way, we’re offering free shipping this week only on any NPS-tagged items in the shop. What are you waiting for? Put on your best John Muir hat, and go explore.

(Just don’t forget to use code CBNPS at checkout.)

But wait, there’s more!

We're also giving away 3 America The Beautiful passes. That’s free entry to EVERY park for an entire year! And all we're asking you to do is post a picture. Seriously.

1. Post a picture of yourself in a National Park with the hashtag #CBNPS
2. Don’t wait! We will select 3 winners on Monday 5/1

If your picture happens to be with a CB item, we’ll count it as a triple entry. Just make sure your social media post is live by in time! And don’t forget the hashtag.

We’ll be keeping an eye on Instagram, Twitter, and Mastodon. If you post somewhere else that we might miss, email us. We’ll make sure you’re included in the drawing.

See ya on the trails!

P.S. If you have a 4th grader living with you, you can get a free parks pass for your family. It takes less than 10 minutes.

We’ve been making hats almost as long as we’ve been making t-shirts, though on a much smaller scale. For just as long, we’ve been asking ourselves, “why can’t we sell hats on demand? People seem to like ‘em.” Well, now we can.

We are very pleased to officially announce our on demand embroidery program. What you see below are real photos of real hats that are really available to buy right now. The quality is fantastic. We’re using the exact same hats and machines that we use for our stock and campaign embroidery. The only difference is that on demand embroidered hats are available 24/7 and ship within a week.

Let’s get those questions and answers out of the way. Especially the Big One.

Can I make a hat?

Possibly! That’s not a “no”, but it’s also not a “yes”. It’s complicated. We’re very constrained right now on the new product creation side, and we’re still evaluating the production process as well. If you are curious, please feel free to email us. We can say that the interest has been phenomenal. We’re accelerating our plans to build a self-serve tool for creating embroidery products. It’s something we intend to deploy widely as soon as possible.

Can I use whatever color thread I want?

You can use whatever color thread you want as long as it is in the list of 15 colors we offer. Said colors include red, orange, gold, brown, lime green, forest green, cyan, sky blue, royal blue, navy, purple, pink, black, white, and silver. If you’re more of a visual learner, here’s a PDF you can use.

What kinds of hats do you have?

We’ve got low-profile dad hats, flat-brimmed snapbacks, and mesh-backed trucker hats, withand without ropes. Hat colors are black, black, black, black, black, navy, and dark grey. Just kidding, we also have light blue and light khaki available in the dad hats. Other colors maybe, possibly available upon request as we continue to build out and expand our catalog.

How much do hats cost?

The base costs for all hats is $30. Just like other on demand products, the default margin is $5 for a retail price of $35. You’re welcome to adjust that up or down as needed.

Are there any other limitations I should be aware of?

Yes. Thank you for asking. In general, the smallest details that can be rendered are about 0.04" (1mm). The smallest gaps that can be maintained are 0.01" (0.25mm). The max size on a hat is 5.5" x 2.25". Here’s a good way to think about it: for a medium size design of 1.5", you have canvas that is roughly 75 x 75 pixels. It’s possible to get creative with running stitches and contrasting stitch directions to show subtle detail, but the best hats are going to avoid squishing too much detail into too small a space. When in doubt, err in favor of smaller and simpler.

That’s it for now. 🧢