It’s our birthday and we’ll talk about Blank if we want to! That’s right, Cotton Bureau turnsfour years old today and we’re celebrating by focusing on our newest project—and by giving away a bunch of 20% off coupons and $400 Amazon gift cards (more about that part later).

Since we’re another year wiser, we’ll get straight to the good stuff. You’ve heard that we’re making better t-shirts for women (and men). Now we just need women (and men) to test them. A lot of them, in fact. That’s where you come in. We need about 300 volunteers(women and men of all shapes and sizes, from XS to 5X) to try out our latest Blank prototype tees and give us honest feedback. Here’s how you sign up:

• Fill out the tester survey before Friday, June 16. We’re asking a lot of questions, so thank you in advance for your patience (and don’t forget to check the box to be added to the Blank mailing list).
• When you complete the survey, you’ll receive a 20% off coupon.
• Once the deadline passes, we’ll evaluate all your surveys and make our final selections. Tester tees will ship soon thereafter.

If you’re selected to be a Blank tester, we’ll send you a free prototype tee and have you put it through the ringer for two weeks. Wear it, wash it, wear it again (and, you know, hopefully wash it again). Don’t be easy on it, these tees have to hold up to normal wear and tear. Once the two weeks is up, you can keep the tee…it’s yours. But you must understand that with great t-shirts comes great responsibility. We’ll need you to be generous and timely with yourfeedback. No holds barred. If the length is wrong, the sleeves are awkward, the collar is too tight, or it shrinks too much in the dryer, we want to know (and if it fits like a glove right out of the package, we want to know that too). Oh, and not to add any pressure, but your input will directly affect every CB customer on the planet. Just kidding. Sorta.

If you’re not lucky enough to be selected as a tester, all is not lost. As a thank you for simply completing the survey, you’ll receive a 20% off coupon, good for anything at Cotton Bureau, now or in the future. It’s our way of saying happy birthday to you…or wait, happy birthday to us. It’s somebody’s birthday here, right?

Speaking of Birthdays…

We’re giving away four $400 Amazon gift cards for CB turning—you guessed it—4 yearsold. Y’all have Instagram, right? Twitter and Facebook are just as good. Any social media platform where you can use the hashtag #HappyBlankDay to spread the word about tester signups will work. Because what fun is a party if you can’t celebrate with all your friends(and their friends)? Let’s break it down for you:

• Instagram: Regram our morning post with the hashtag #HappyBlankDay and check our story for a chance to win a $400 Amazon gift card.
• Twitter: Tweet out the hashtag #HappyBlankDay and tag up to five friends. If you have a short memory, see this morning’s tweet.
• Facebook: Share this morning’s post to your page with the hashtag #HappyBlankDay.

Contest ends at midnight ET tonight (Monday, June 12) with winners announced tomorrow.

We can’t say thank you enough for supporting us over the past four years. Coupons and gift cards are fun ways to show our appreciation, but Blank is how we can best reciprocate. We’re more excited about this than anything we’ve done since Cotton Bureau was born four years ago, and we won’t stop ‘till we get you in our Blankday suit.

PS: Imagine us talking super fast through this part. No purchase necessary. US residents only. Limit one entry per person. #HappyBlankDay drawing ends at 11:59 EDT on 6/12. Blank tester signup offer valid until 11:59 EDT on 6/16 or until the response is overwhelming because c’mon we’re only 10 people here.

Last week we asked you guys to help us celebrate turning the big 0-4…and you didn’t disappoint. Over 3,000 people signed up to become Blank testers! We’re overwhelmed by your interest and support. Here’s what happens now:

• We’ve spent this week poring over the entries, and we hope to make our final tester selections soon. There are only about 300 samples to go around, so we have to choose carefully.
• When we determine who the testers will be, we’ll reach out via email, so keep your eyes trained on that inbox.
• Our 100% cotton samples are in hand, and the tri-blend samples will arrive a little later this week. Some of you will receive cotton samples, others will receive tri-blend samples (based on the preference you told us in your survey, or at least as close to your preference as we could get).
• Once you receive your sample, you’ll have two weeks to wear it and wash it as many times as possible, and let us know what you think (we’ll send you a survey to gather feedback).
• Someday—and that day may never come—we will call upon you to do a service for us.Until that day, accept your Blank sample tee as a gift. Actually, that day will certainly come, and that’s when we launch our Kickstarter, but we’ll talk about that later.

As always, we appreciate your dedication to CB and enthusiasm for our latest project. Sign up for the Blank newsletter to stay completely up-to-date.

Back in mid-February, we lifted the lid on Blank, our mission to make better t-shirts for women (and men). Then, well, we disappeared for a few months. Frankly, we’ve been a little busy this year: packing and shipping almost 100,000 shirts (more than all of last year), moving into a brand-new office, hiring and on-boarding more than a handful of new people, etc. But just because we’ve been quiet about Blank doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any progress. Far from it. We’re just (very) overdue for an update, so here’s everything that’s happened since you last heard from us:

We teamed up with a pattern maker.

Meet Melanie Yi. A 25-year veteran of the apparel industry, Melanie’s been patiently holding our hand every step of the way—producing (and tweaking, and tweaking, and tweaking) patterns, consulting on fabrics, fit, and model selection, and racking up frequent flyer miles between NYC and Pittsburgh. She’s become an indispensable member of Team Blank.

We visited a few factories.

After countless conversations, endless research, and a handful of scouting visits, we landed on a few factory finalists: a full-service apparel maker in Los Angeles, an apparel consultant/liaison who plays matchmaker between brands and factories (also in Los Angeles), and a cut-and-sew factory right here in Pennsylvania. We’d love to keep our production at home in the Keystone State, but we’re likely going to end up out on the West Coast (we know…what a shame to have such a frequent excuse to leave our beautiful Rust Belt weather behind for dreary Southern California).

We produced our first round of samples (and second and third rounds are coming soon).

That’s right, Blank t-shirts actually exist (just not very many of them, and only in a few sizes). We had a first run of samples produced by multiple factories—tri-blend and 100% cotton in medium and 2X for women, medium for men—to compare fit, consistency, and construction quality. If you’re wondering why we didn’t make all the sizes, you always start with just a few—usually only medium—and base all the other sizes off it (in a process known as “grading”). In our case, we developed two separate patterns for our women’s tee (one for XS–XL, one for 2X–5X) to make sure everything fits like it’s supposed to. Truth be told, we’re already pretty happy with the samples. We know that because…

We had our first model fitting.

A dozen local models showed up to participate in our first Blank fit session early last month, and the results were better than we could’ve expected (particularly on our tri-blends and women’s 2X shirts). We’ll be dialing in the fit and proportions over the next few sample iterations, but aside from a few consistent issues (the sleeves were a little tight across the board, and the body was a little too relaxed), they’re already pretty close. A second limited round of samples comes back within days for another model fitting next week, and we’re already producing the fabric for a full run of XS–5X in both men’s and women’s cuts (see our last update for more on that).

We’re preparing for our upcoming Kickstarter.

In our first post, we mentioned that we’d be launching Blank with a Kickstarter this summer, and we’re still on track for that. We’re teaming up with our friends at Sandwich Video to produce our Kickstarter video. The shoot is at the end of the month, and we might enlist a few of you as on-camera talent. If you live in or near LA, you’ll be hearing from us very soon.

You might get your hands on a Blank tee sooner than you think.

As we mentioned, we’re already producing the fabric for a full-scale run of tees, and we’re gonna need some testers (that means you). We’ll be posting a questionnaire for open tester slots in the next couple weeks, so stay tuned on that.

That’s it for now. Thanks for hanging with us, and we promise it won’t be two-and-a-half months before you hear from us again. We can’t wait to get Blank out there.

We have a confession to make: our women’s t-shirts suck.

Alright, maybe that’s a little inaccurate, let’s be more specific: our women’s t-shirt sizing sucks. It always has, and if you’ve ever bought a women’s t-shirt from us and it was way too small, we apologize (chances are, this is not the first time we’ve apologized to you for this). It’s time we did something about it. So all we need to do is switch t-shirt suppliers, right? Wrong.

You see, finding a wholesale t-shirt manufacturer that fits all our criteria has been…challenging (to say the least). We need a brand with modern fits, a wide range of colors and fabrics, ethical manufacturing, reliable quality and consistency, always-available stock, and it’d be reeeeal nice if it was made in America. Finding a brand that checks all those boxes and oh yeah also fits women is damn near impossible. If you can find a women’s brand that comes in our preferred colors and fabrics, it’s only available in mega-tiny junior sizing. If it’s sized to fit most women, the cut is awkward, the fabric isn’t anywhere near our standards, and it comes in whatever color you want…as long as that color is pink. It’s frustrating for us as a company, and every bit as frustrating for you as our customer. We know how demoralizing it is to buy one of our t-shirt designs, wait weeks for it to arrive, then hurriedly try it on only to find out that it’s about six sizes smaller than you expected. It shouldn’t be like this, and it kills us that we haven’t been able to find a women’s t-shirt that works.

So we’re gonna make our own.

Today, we’re lifting the lid on Blank, our project to design and produce better t-shirts from the ground up: our sizes, our fits, our fabrics, our colors. Over the last six months, we’ve been building relationships with people all over the garment industry: pattern makers, fabric suppliers, cut-and-sew operations, industry consultants, full-service apparel factories, fit models, and more. We’ve even produced a few samples. We’re going to need all the help we can get, which is why reached out to Indie.vc for funding last year (remember this cryptic line?) and hired a project lead to give it the attention it deserves (we’ll introduce her in a bit). Exciting, huh? It’s something we’ve been talking about forever, and the fact that it’s actually happening is a bit surreal. Let’s answer some questions.

* * *

OMG will your women’s tees finally fit me?

We hope so! We have a lot of goals with Blank, and #1 is “make t-shirts that fit most women.” We know that we can’t design a single t-shirt that will fit everybody, but we can make something that’s a hell of a lot better than what we have now. And it won’t just be limited to women…we’re making men’s tees too (and if you like how our men’s tees fit, we have good news: we’re not changing them much).

Are you replacing your entire t-shirt line?

Not for a while, no. We’ll probably introduce Blank as a premium option alongside our current Next Level tees, starting with a very limited range of colors and fabrics and gradually expanding over time. It’s gonna take us some time to find our sea legs. We won’t become American Apparel overnight.

Where will your t-shirts be produced? Please say the U.S.

We’re gonna try our damnedest to make these in the U.S. There’s a chance they might even be cut-and-sewn right here in Pennsylvania.

When is this happening?

We’re launching Blank later this year with a Kickstarter campaign (right now we’re eyeing June–July 2017) and they’ll be available as Cotton Bureau graphic tees shortly thereafter. Sit tight. We’re not at the beginning of the process, but we’re also nowhere near the end.

Will I be able to buy them blank?

Yes! We’re not just saving them for our graphic tees. That’s actually something we’re most excited about. Note: we’re not planning on selling them wholesale (not yet, anyway).

This sounds complicated…is this really going to work?

It is complicated. We now know more about yarn gauges, fabric weights, and the finer points of dyeing methods than we ever wanted to (and there’s still so much more to learn). And hey, who knows if it’ll work? We could sink the whole company! But we’ll never know if we don’t try. And if it does work, t-shirts are just the beginning.

Who’s running this show?

Meet Michelle Sharp. She joined Cotton Bureau last September and has been running point on Blank since day one. If you have any comments, advice, complaints, or notes of encouragement, email blank@cottonbureau.com and it’ll get to her. Most future posts about Blank will come from her.

How can I stay up-to-date on Blank developments?

Keep an eye on this blog, sign up for our Blank newsletter at the bottom of this page, and follow the hashtag #BlankbyCB on Twitter and Instagram.

That’s all we have to share for now, but there’ll be plenty more in the coming weeks and months. We hope this makes you as excited as it makes us. Wish us luck.