WE HAVE A BRACKET!

The field is set! CB’s first ever Top Pun Tournament tips today. Four quadrants, 5 rounds, and 32 of the punniest tees our designers could come up with all come down to one winner on April 5th. Buckle up, there’s gonna be a lot of blood, sweat, and cringing over the next two weeks.

Before we announce the regions and schedule, here’s a little rules refresher:

• Entries are paired up bracket style in a 5 round tournament.
• Winners are determined via @cottonbureau twitter poll voting. So share our Twitter Moments for each round and get your friends and family to do the same.
• Orders = 3 votes each FOR ONLY THE CHAMPIONSHIP ROUND.

Of course we should remind you of what you’re all playing for. Pride. Jk… you’re also playing for a laser engraved Leather Head basketball. Second place will receive a copy of Basketball (and Other Things) by Shea Serrano. And don’t forget that you’ll take home cold hard cash for every sale you make after 25—so don’t be afraid use the Top Pun Tourney for some promo mo regardless of your standing.

REGIONS

The road to the finals starts right here. There’s no easy matchups when it comes to the Top Pun Tournament, but escape the first round and you may just make a Cinderella run. So let’s get right to the bracket.

To find your matchup (and see the road ahead if you dare) head over to our Top Pun Tournament homepage.

SCHEDULE

The polls opened today for round 1 of the Rickles and Rivers regions. If your tee is in either of those quadrants, you should already be collecting votes. It’s as easy as sharing today’s Twitter Moment. You have until midnight Sunday night to rack up as many as possible.

https://twitter.com/cottonbureau/status/976918805145321472

Each round will start the same way, so keep an eye on @cottonbureau if you’re lucky enough to survive and advance.

The second half of round 1 starts on Tuesday and ends Thursday night at midnight ET. That’s you, Youngman and Hedberg entries (we don’t need to mention the whole Twitter moment thing again, right?). Remaining rounds will take place over the second week of the tournament:

• Round 2: Friday, March 30 — Monday, April 2
• Round 3: Tuesday, April 3
• Round 4: Wednesday, April 4
• Finals: Thursday, April 5

May the best pun win!

We know…this is the year you’re gonna win your office tournament pool. We totally believe you. But just in case March 2018 ends up like every other March, maybe jump in Cotton Bureau’s inaugural Top Pun Tournament. It’s just like the real thing…you can pull an upset over a big name, make a Cinderella run to the championship, and get paid (see… it really is just like college hoops)! Here’s how it works…

If you follow us on Twitter, you know we can’t resist a good pun, and now it’s your turn. Make it about your favorite animal, place, movie, food, or whatever other goofy subject you can think of. Just make sure you send it in before next Tuesday, March 20, because any submissions after that will not be considered for the bracket.

Entries will be pitted against each other one round at a time in a fight to the finish starting with Round 1 on Thursday, March 22. Winners will be determined via @cottonbureau Twitter polls. Whichever tee has the most votes in its matchup wins. Survive and advance. Oh and we should mention: every order will count as three (3!) votes during the championship round — so don’t be afraid to butter up the genius who picked Lipscomb to go to the Final Four.

After that, we’ll whittle the field down to one final design that will be etched in tournament history. Winner gets a Luther Vandross poster and DVD of Charles Barkley’s best commercials. Okay not really, but what you will win is a very handsome Leather Head basketball, laser-engraved with your name and champion status (a $220 value, and btw, Leather Head’s logo was hand-lettered by our pal and yours, Jon Contino). Runner-up receives the fantastic book Basketball (and Other Things) by Shea Serrano (illustrated by another friend of Cotton Bureau, Arturo Torres).

So who’s ready to draw up a wordplay for the win? Submit your design today!

We’re about to do something you probably don’t expect: all current stock of Blank shirts is on clearance for $14 (normally $28) with free US shipping from now through February 28 or until it’s all gone, whichever comes first. If you backed Blank on Kickstarter and love your shirts, now’s the time to stock up, because trust us, they won’t be this cheap ever again. If you wanna know why a company semi-notorious for never having big sales is all of a sudden having a big sale, keep reading.

If you’ve been following along with Blank for any length of time, you’re probably wondering why you can’t yet buy a Cotton Bureau graphic tee on a Blank shirt. After all, it’s been five months since the Kickstarter ended, and the first batch of shirts arrived in December. So what’s the hold up, right? Bear with us, because there’s a long-winded answer.

We’re a weird company. Well, weird for a t-shirt company, that is. For the t-shirt companies that design and manufacture blank tees for retail or wholesale, chances are that’s all they do. For the companies making printed tees, chances are that’s all they do. It’s very rare to find a t-shirt company doing both, but you’re looking at one. And as it turns out, shirts that are meant to be blank and shirts that are meant to be printed on have different attributes. One of those attributes is — and we know this is likely to elicit some Seinfeldian giggles — shrinkage.

You’re probably only familiar with one kind of t-shirt shrinkage, the kind that happens when you wash and dry a new tee (particularly a 100% cotton one). You lose some length at the bottom, and maybe a tiny bit around the middle. Most garment manufacturers — good ones anyway, like us — build that shrinkage into their patterns so that a shirt fits correctly after it’s been washed and dried. But there’s another kind of shrinkage…one that you don’t have to worry about, but as we’ve learned, we do.

When you screen print a graphic onto a shirt, the ink needs to cure to become permanently affixed to the fabric. This is achieved with a curing oven, essentially a conveyor belt that sends a shirt through a temperature controlled environment for a specific period of time. It gets pretty hot in there, and certain fabrics — like polyester and rayon in a tri-blend tee — respond by shrinking. This is a problem for us, because unlike our 100% cotton tees, we didn’t build that extra shrinkage into our tri-blend pattern (oops). That means a printed tri-blend Blank tee is going to fit smaller than a blank tri-blend Blank tee. Couple that with a few too-small areas on our first batch of tri-blend fits, and it turns out a printed Blank is a lot smaller than we want it to be, and “too small” is the very problem Blank is tackling in the first place. Not great. But we fixed it.

We made a few changes to our patterns (thanks to those of you who showed up for a quick Blank fit session in NYC a few weeks ago, and everyone else who emailed us with your feedback), but nothing major: an inch here or half-inch there. But more importantly, we made a big change to the fabric itself by pre-shrinking it, both our cotton and tri-blend. That means that the next iteration of Blank—let’s call it Blank 2.0, already in progress at the factory — won’t shrink much in your dryer or our print shop’s curing ovens (and, bonus: they’ll be even softer and more durable). But it also means that we can’t really use Blank 1.0 for printed tees, so we’re getting rid of them (hence the Blank Slate Sale). Again, they’re pretty damn close to perfect…as long as you don’t need to screen print on them.

Thanks for sticking with us. These are the kinds of things you learn when you’re trying to make a t-shirt brand from scratch. There are going to be bumps and hurdles and false starts and growing pains. When we publicly announced Blank last February, we said “we won’t become American Apparel overnight,” and a year later that’s truer than ever. This is hard. If it wasn’t, someone else would’ve already done it. Hell, we haven’t even mentioned the difficulties involved in learning how to manage a brand new and complicated supply chain, costly inventory, and front-loaded cash flow, or working with a factory for the first time, but that’s another blog post. For now, we can’t thank you enough for your patience, and we know it’ll be worth it. Cotton Bureau designs on Blank will be here sooner than you think (in fact, clear your calendars for next month).

This holiday season is a little happier thanks to all of you. A few weeks ago y’all teamed up with us to raise $4,194 for Donor’s Choose causes. Nice work, fam! Just to add a little perspective, your generosity helped eight classrooms and 890 students get the school supplies they need. Around here, we call that a successful Give Back Friday.

We can talk numbers all day, but it’s more real to tell you about the kids you actually helped. All 491 of you who ordered on Give Back Friday got great tees, while pre-school students got books to read at home, high schoolers got supplies to explore painting, and elementary students got the gift of drones. Your giving also benefited students with autism, children who need tools to practice mindfulness and kindness, and several schools in need of sports equipment. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s 30 different projects funded and nearly $12,000 raised since 2015. To see the entire list of funded projects, visit our Donor’s Choose page .

Just because Give Back Friday is over doesn’t mean you can’t still pitch in though. If you want to make a donation, we suggest pushing the final few projects we started over the hump. Of course, there are thousands of other worthy causes at Donor’s Choose as well.

Now that #ALLTHETEES 2017 is over, the elves at Cotton Bureau are bracing for a total tee takeover. We’ve rearranged the office and optimized our Chemex making capabilities so that we can get your shirts to you on time. But we did want to take a moment here and thank you for supporting Give Back Friday this year, everyone.

Same time, same place next year?

It’s the holidays, so we’re temporarily raising prices. Nope, we didn’t stutter, we’re raising prices. We’ve got a good reason, and it’s not that we all need a week in Hawaii.

This Friday, November 17, is Give Back Friday. Here’s the lowdown. On Friday, you’ll see the price of our pre-order tees increase by $3. That $3 plus an additional $3 from Cotton Bureau will be donated to fund our favorite classroom projects from DonorsChoose.org.

This year we’re supporting several projects from our hometown of Pittsburgh, and others in Hollywood, FL, Miami, FL, Minneapolis, MN, Cleveland, OH and New Cumberland, WV. Teachers are seeking support for things like sports equipment, laptops, books, paint, and musical instruments to help them drop some knowledge and level up their classrooms. Find the full details and budget for each project on our Donors Choose page.

This is our third year, and our previous campaigns raised $6,409 combined. While that’s good, we don’t settle for good. So this year we want to raise $10,000 to fully fund each and every project we’ve picked.

That’s a lot, but we’ve also got a lot of tees — ALL THE TEES, in fact — so let’s raise ALL THE MONEY.

If you’re ready to rip the band-aid off and check off your whole Holiday shopping list, this is the day to do it. You (or your mom, or your Secret Santa, or your cat) get a sweet graphic tee, and you support learning, creativity, and inclusivity in the classroom.

How’s that for some warm ‘n fuzzy feelings? Now let’s make it happen. Tune in to our Twitter feed on Friday where we’ll be live tweeting our progress.

PS: Reading this from the future and missed Give Back Friday? Feeling extra generous? You can always donate without buying a tee at our DonorsChoose page. Go you!