N.B. design has been modified since publication.

Make new home pages, but keep the old; one is silver, the other, gold, is, to the best of my knowledge, how the saying goes.

Last week we soft-launched the new Cotton Bureau home page. It (finally) has touch navigation for product images. It looks incredible on mobile, tablet, and most other devices. Each shirt has custom colors, copy, and big, full-bleed images. The designer gets his or her name in lights, and we have a live countdown so you know the last possible second before the design goes away. You can even buy a shirt without leaving the home page. Go look at it right now. We’ll wait.

Now that the design is live, we naturally have some things to say. To start, I want to quote my partner Jay from this week’s email newsletter,

If you’re a service (which we are), a homepage is supposed to promote your benefits and entice people to sign up. If you’re a shop (which we also are), it’s supposed to feature the best/newest/shiniest products your brand has to offer. On any website, it’s supposed to act as a traffic cop, directing people to the content they’re looking for. If we’re being frank, our previous homepage, well…it did exactly none of that. It was the least we could get away with when we launched almost three years ago, and we’re embarrassed to say it hadn’t changed much since.

It took us months of painful conversations to decide what we wanted this page to do. The dam finally broke a few weeks ago. We couldn’t be more excited to have the new home page live and feel confident in the direction of the site.

A home page is a window into a vast world which necessarily means you can’t show (or do) everything. What you see now when you come to Cotton Bureau is the tip of the iceberg rather than (as before) the iceberg itself. When you arrive, you’re greeted by a testimonial from just one of the heaps of happy people we’ve worked with. If you scroll, you’ll see the main navigation and then five of our favorite shirts from the nearly 100 shirts that are available for sale on any given day. Three tightly focused areas checking the three boxes we had assigned for ourselves: pitch the service, provide essential navigation, promote shopping. Boom, nailed it.

Since launching, however, many have gently and not-so-gently pointed out some of our more glaring omissions. The huge focus on soliciting designs can be off-putting to customers. Viewing at it on a 5K iMac is, uhm, intimidating at best. We even forgot to show prices and size charts on the featured products.

Look, this isn’t our first website. We knew it wouldn’t be perfect out of the gate. Little stuff like that is easy to correct. What disappointed us most (we’re human, we were hoping for an enthusiastic response) was that what was so obvious in our heads was being misinterpreted by what felt like… pretty much everyone. Even for people as headstrong as Jay and I, it hurts to feel you’ve dropped the ball.

We may be stubborn (okay, we’re definitely stubborn); we hope we’re not blind. If it took us that long to find a home page solution we were excited about, we know we can’t expect you to feel the same way overnight. So let’s start again from the top, looking at each section and seeing if we can’t find where we went wrong and where we need to double-down.

If you’re not familiar with Cotton Bureau, when you first arrive at the home page you may be asking, who is Cotton Bureau and why should I care? If you’re a designer and you want to work together you may be wondering why you can’t just submit a design directly from the home page. If you’re one of our many regular customers (thank you!) who enjoy the giant wall of shirts, you are most certainly wondering where they all went. No matter who you are, it’s natural to want the thing you’re looking for to be the most obvious thing on the page. When it’s not, that’s a frustrating experience. It’s our job to speak to the right people at the right time. We tried to be clever and in-your-face with this design. If that came at the expense of clarity and usefulness, we need to try again. This new home page is a step the right direction, but it’s only a step. We clearly still have some work to do.

When we launched Cotton Bureau in 2013, the home page we built looked more or less the same as the home page you would have seen if you had come to the site last week and what you can still see if you go to the Shopsection: a message at the top followed by a grid of all the shirts we have for sale right now. The message has periodically changed—submit a tee, check out this shirt, kids tees are here, we’re running a sale, etc.—but the block has always been there. It’s a (good) convention when building websites to use the hero / above-the-fold area to promote your most important stuff. The new home page keeps that idea around. When we updated the home page last week, it was our belief that we needed to speak to designers in that area. We did that by showing testimonials. Based on feedback we’ve gotten, we think that was a mistake. We should instead speak first to people who don’t know who and what Cotton Bureau is, whether that person is a potential designer or someone just interested in buying shirts.

Below the testimonials area we hoped to move people as quickly and easily as possible to the major site destinations — shop, submit, kids, archive. We like that design and approach, but it has become clear that the navigation is, despite our best efforts to create a quiet space in what is admittedly a loud and busy design, getting lost. We’re going to fix that soon.

The major change, however, and the one I want to discuss in depth, is intended to speak to people visiting Cotton Bureau for the first time: the grid is gone. Say hello to the stream.

The Stream

Streams and grids are UI patterns we encounter every day on the internet. They each have their strengths and weaknesses, and they are very much notinterchangeable. Grids are great for seeing a lot at the same time, applying filters, scanning quickly, hunting. Streams are designed for consuming content linearly. That doesn’t mean they aren’t scannable, but they do force you to slow down and see each item individually. Streams are friendlier to beginners; grids, to experts. Streams are one-dimensional; grids, two-dimensional. (Don’t take my word for it, check out this David Galbraith post on the history of visual bookmarking.) A stream can be well designed or poorly designed (as can a grid), but it is still necessary to choose the right tool for the job. We love the grid. It bears repeating: you can still see all the shirts as a grid right here. Not only is the grid not going away, moving it to /shop allows us to begin adding features like searching and filtering that would have been cumbersome at best on the home page. But let’s get back to the stream, we’ve acknowledged it’s less efficient than the grid, so why use it?

The answer is simple: we want to provide a different, more accessible, more attractive (to some people) experience. To understand where we’re coming from and why we’re trying to provide that experience, you need to know how Cotton Bureau works on a fundamental level. The vast majority of sales come from individuals bypassing the home page and visiting a specific shirt page, almost entirely through word-of-mouth. Let’s call this group of people “visitors”. Visitors are more than happy to use Cotton Bureau to buy the thing they came to buy. Sometimes they take advantage of a feature like the reminder emails to buy the thing they came to buy at a later time, but rarely do they venture beyond the product they originally came to purchase. Sometimes they do, and when they do, you might say they become “users” of Cotton Bureau. A user may click a related product, create an account, sign up for the newsletter, browse all the available shirts, interact with us on Twitter, or even submit a design. When we design and build the site, we do the best we can to encourage visitors to become users—and we constantly ask ourselves how we can create more users, whether by converting visitors into users or by attracting more visitors to Cotton Bureau in the first place.

As part of the mission I described previously, we are very interested in 1) staying in business and 2) enabling great design. Sales of any given t-shirt are not highly correlated with (in our subjective opinion) the design’s merit. Shirts sell for many reasons—interest in the design content, familiarity with the designer, identification with a community, quality, price, color, perceived scarcity, time of day/week/month/year, number of exposures, and dozens of other factors, some within our control, many not. The design itself, unfortunately, is often one of the least important considerations, which brings us back to why we built the stream: we see too many great designs fail to find an audience.

We want to elevate the best designs to give them the greatest possible chance of succeeding. Whether you’re a new visitor or an old hand, we’re hoping to bring everyone together on the home page to rally around—and potentially even disagree about—smart, sophisticated, funny, thoughtful, beautiful shirts. We want Cotton Bureau to be a destination for t-shirt enthusiasts and design junkies. We want to create demand for shirts where demand otherwise didn’t exist. We want to build and cultivate a community. We want to connect designers and their designs in a way the site has not done to this point. Being featured in the stream is a badge of honor, something to be strived for. We want to direct the firehose of home page attention as much as possible at these particular tees for going above and beyond. Designers whose designs make it into the stream deserve to be rewarded for excellence.

The stream isn’t perfect today, we know that. We can and will design opportunities for people to exit the stream to see the most popular tees, the most liked tees, tees about sports, animals, and space, more tees from the same designer, or kids tees. We’ll tweak the design as necessary to work as well at grotesquely large sizes as it does on mobile. Community features aren’t baked in yet, but they’re coming. (Sign up for a Cotton Bureau account now if you haven’t yet.) Most importantly, we are listening. Tell us what you think. Leave a comment. Vent to us on Twitter at @cottonbureau. Email us@cottonbureau.com if you want to say something privately.

In the meantime, we want you to know that stream isn’t going anywhere and neither is the grid. They’re both vital aspects of Cotton Bureau’s personality. Browse the grid, get lost in the stream, and, whatever you do, tell a friend about Cotton Bureau, eh? Great design doesn’t market itself.

Cotton Bureau as it exists today didn’t arise in a vacuum, nor did it emerge from our shared consciousness in a fully realized state. Its quirks and idiosyncrasies, beauties and strengths, warts and blemishes are a textbook case of the intertwingled roles of nature and nurture.

Much of the original DNA, especially pre-orders and collaborations with designers and like-minded companies, came from our experience selling t-shirts and other gewgaws as United Pixelworkers.

Our adoption of the pre-order was in response to an existential threat. United Pixelworkers was a side project of our web design and development shop, Full Stop. While the idea resonated, the business model was lousy and the attention it demanded was a significant distraction from the work we needed to be doing for paying customers. If United Pixelworkers wanted to stick around, it needed to start carrying its weight. We took the site down for a few months to give ourselves time to think about what to do. If we couldn’t fix it, we were going to shut it down for good. Fortunately for fans of Cotton Bureau, we decided to give it another shot with a few modifications.

The first adjustment—limited time only pre-orders—was borrowed from John Gruber’s ephemeral Daring Fireball t-shirt store: it comes and goes as demand warrants. The pre-order model is a blindingly elegant solution (inverting the entire chain of retail dependencies) to the small business problem of maintaining stock. Instead of being subject to the caprice of customer attention, pre-orders allow sellers to accommodate an unlimited number of buyers while simultaneously moving the anxiety from the seller (“do I have enough stock?”) to the buyer (“am I going to miss out?”). It worked wonders for United Pixelworkers and immediately spawned the question that led us to where we are today: would it work for others too?

Which brings us to the second change we made. From that point on, in addition to selling t-shirts designed in-house, we would reach out to designers we admired, collaborate on a new shirt design, and split the profits. The results spoke for themselves. Sales before the changes were in the low double digits per month. Sales after rose to mid triple digits. It’s not often you can induce a 10x jump in revenue. By the end of 2010 we were working with industry heavyweights like Aaron Draplin, Jessica Hische, Meagan Fisher, and Bobby McKenna. In January 2012 we launched United Pixelworkers 3.0 and cracked the door open to select partners like A Book Apart, Rdio (RIP), and Dribbble. It worked. Now it was time to invite everyone else to participate. To do that, however, we needed to make one more change, bigger than any that had come before: launch Cotton Bureau.

Before we move on to the evolution of the business model and its conscious uncoupling from United Pixelworkers, though, there’s another piece of DNA we need to discuss. Cotton Bureau, United Pixelworkers, and Full Stop are or were products of the unions of at least two very different people. If you’ve ever met Jay and I, or heard us speak at a conference, you know just how different. With the exception of our commitment to product quality and a shared belief that nothing is good enough, we have almost zero in common physically, mentally, or emotionally—at least if you’re willing to look past the two-English-speaking-white-guys-in-their-30s-from-the-Northeast angle. We’re on opposite ends of the religious, family, and political spectrums. Finding a solution that works for both of us is an exercise in patience and self-control, but we believe running that gauntlet is imperative. The struggle (usually) separates the good ideas from the bad. As the company has grown, more voices have entered the conversation. When we talk about whether something is right for Cotton Bureau, we have to factor in this strange and volatile DNA.

So much for the pre-story, the origin story, the inception of Cotton Bureau. Nature did its part. Cotton Bureau is now only months away from its third birthday. In the weird, hyper, Tsetse fly pace of Internetland, that means we’re already several dozen generations old. Time to get our act together.

When we talk about the evolution of a company, in this case our company, what we’re really talking about are the thousands of decisions we make, small and large, and the external, unplanned events that force us to confront and test our beliefs. How long should shirts be on the site for? Who should be allowed to sell shirts on the site? Should we sell only shirts? What is our policy on international sales and submissions? Should we make money, lose money, or break even on shipping? Who is our competition? Does it matter? Should we bootstrap, self-finance, take on debt, or sell equity? Where do we get the shirts? Who prints them? Do we ship them ourselves or have someone else ship them? When should we focus on product and when on marketing? Is 40 hours per week not enough? Too much? Just right? Should we travel and sell our goods at conferences? What about wholesale? Traditional brick-and-mortar retail? I’ll stop now, not because the questions have run out but because, hopefully, you get the point. The questions neverend, and each one microscopically reveals or, often, changes who you are. Some of the consequences can be predicted ahead of time, many are shrouded in mystery.

Thankfully we’ve walked this road together for almost seven years now. We’ve answered all of those questions, at least temporarily. What we need to do is share those answers—and answers to other questions as well—with you. There are both selfish and altruistic reasons for us to do so. Selfishly, we need your support to stay in business, and that’s kind of a big deal. If we give you a glimpse behind the scenes, show you the people, explain our motivations. If we can possibly even give you a reason to believe in what we’re doing, we think it helps our chances of sticking around. Less selfishly, we think you deserve to know. We think it can help you as you try to make these decisions in your own lives and businesses. Most importantly, however, concentrating our internal conversations has a wonderfully clarifying effect. It reduces our cognitive load and allows us to be more consistent in our decision making. It’s not a roadmap as much as a framework.

When we started Cotton Bureau, we didn’t know what to expect. We were only hoping to validate an idea, the idea that if we took on the responsibility of providing the website, production, fulfillment, and customer service, anyone could sell t-shirts using our pre-order model. That idea has long since been validated. It’s time to set the stage for what comes next, a more mature, long-term focused company. So, without further delay, here are Cotton Bureau’s core beliefs:

1. Stay in Business
2. Enable Great Design
3. Help Communities
4. Have Fun
5. Be Ourselves

Stay in Business

Not the most noble of places to start, is it? We’re okay with that. As much as our ideals influence what we do on one side of the equation, our very real need to put food on the table and keep the repo man from yanking the table out from under the food constrains us on the other. Staying in business means a lot of things. It’s not so much that it compromises our decision making as that it grounds us in what is possible. While we would love to have twice as many people working diligently to add features to the site and brainstorming ways of making our customers’ lives better, we have to be patient. Sure it would be nice to pay designers more, to let customers pay less, and magically make it up on volume. Yeah, that’s not the way it works. Someone always has to pay. We believe that by putting our hard costs on the top line, we are providing an invaluable service, that of sticking around. If you like what we’re doing, know that we plan on doing it for a long time and that means building a healthy, sustainable business.

Enable Great Design

Design is and always has been central to Cotton Bureau. You won’t have any trouble finding places to sell you cheap, ugly clothing. Let Cotton Bureau be an oasis for and an incubator of good design. From the design of the site to the design on the shirts to the design of the shirts to the design of the business, we’re committed to thoughtfulness, care, and attention to detail. If you encounter bad design, if you see room for improvement, tell us. We want to make it better. If you are a designer, work with us. Great design deserves an audience, and it deserves to get paid. We’re working to do both.

Help Communities

What is a community? A community is simply a group of people with a shared interest. United Pixelworkers was a community. Batlabels is a community. Programmers who love Bower are a community. Fans of The Incomparable are a community. We love supporting communities, and it just so happens, communities often need one or both of two things we happen to be very good at: merchandise and fundraising. Whenever a community intersects with great design (or even just good design), we want to be there to help. If you run a community or participate in a community and you want to give your fellow community members a way to represent that community, talk to us. If you want to give your audience, your fans, your customers, or your friends and family a way to support what you do, talk to us. We believe helping communities is a core part of what we do. Doing it well is essential to our future.

Have Fun

Designing t-shirts is fun. Selling t-shirts is fun. Wearing t-shirts is fun. If we lose sight of that, if our focus drifts too far toward units sold and average selling price and conversion rates, what’s the point? Anyone can game the system (for a while) with predacious, manipulative Facebook ads, incessant retargeting, and lowest common denominator design. It may be profitable, but it’s also a soul-crushing commoditization of people. Let’s not do that.

Be Ourselves

This is admittedly a weird umbrella-style category, one that probably overlaps with a lot of what we’ve already said. Having gotten to know ourselves pretty well over the years, however, we’d like to put a few things out there as non-negotiables.

Customer Service

Great customer service is a big deal for us. We don’t have a fancy name for it. We don’t have a handbook or a pithy motto. The customer is definitely not always right. We sometimes make mistakes. But we care. And it’s us calling the post office, answering emails and tweets, putting shirts in bags each day. To be honest, it’s not always fun. This may surprise you, but some people feel very entitled to a level of perfection we have yet to achieve. Thankfully, the hand-written notes, emails, and tweets we get thanking us for our care more than make up for it. Great customer service is certainly an investment we expect to pay off, but that’s not why we do it. It’s silly to quote the golden rule in the context of business, but it’s actually very apt. We try to treat our customers as we would like other businesses to treat us.

Product Quality

My dad has been a printer all his life. Guess what? There are many times I can barely tell the difference between shirts we approve and shirts we send back to have done again. The quality of the screenprinting of our shirts is second to none. We’re so far beyond the level of acceptable print quality that 99 percent of our customers would never notice if it started to slip. Is that a mistake? We don’t think so. We intend to stand for things we believe in, and our product quality is one of them. If digital printing reaches parity with screen printing, we’ll be right there to take advantage of it. (Full disclosure: we already use digital printing for kids tees and, for certain designs that screen printing is not possible, we would consider using digital at the designer’s request.)

What do you think of our shirts, do you like them? Good. We do too. You don’t? Funny story, neither do we. Relying on wholesalers to supply shirts is a messy and fragile dependency that we simultaneously appreciate and regret. We are constantly at the mercy of someone else’s decisions on color, sizing, and availability. If there’s one thing we could snap our fingers and change today, it would be our shirt sourcing. Off-the-shelf wholesale works for most people, most of the time, but it’s never going to work well enough for us to be satisfied. If the cost and complexity of creating and stocking our own shirts were not prohibitive, we would have done it long ago. When we do get to that point, you’ll be the first to know.

User Experience

The founding team at Cotton Bureau was three web people. We make websites, that’s what we do. If we had our druthers, that’s all we would do. Our intention is to continue to move the state of e-commerce forward with each iteration of the site. We’re proud of the site we’ve built, yet at the same time we see every flaw, every missing feature, every opportunity to make your experience using the site better. No matter what else happens over the next 10 years, continual improvement of the website is our expectation.

Beyond the website, we consider your entire interaction with Cotton Bureau to be part of user experience. Did you like the shirt packaging? Was the return or exchange process simple? Were your expectations met? Did you enjoy working with us to have your design listed? We love the challenge of improving and fine-tuning every aspect of the experience. It’s an endless job, but there’s nothing better.

Company Culture

Jay and I aren’t going anywhere. The company isn’t getting sold. We’re building something to last. If the people we surround ourselves with aren’t happy, if they can’t do great work, if they immediately regret signing on with us, we’re not going to be happy—and there isn’t some big payday waiting for us in the future as long as we satisfy our shareholders.

We all have to do things we would rather not do, but there’s a simple way to check to see if you’re on track: do you like your job? It’s a question previous generations didn’t spend much time contemplating. It’s a question many, many people do not have the luxury of asking themselves. It’s a question that goes beyond pay and benefits to responsibility, opportunity, autonomy, and camaraderie. If you ask anyone at Cotton Bureau, we like to think the answer will be “yes”. If it isn’t, we have a problem.

Cultural challenges change constantly. When we were three people, we had to work through those issues. Now that we’re six people, we have new issues. When we’re 12 people, we’ll have still different issues. Working remotely and working in an office. Working in one big room in an office and working in separate rooms. Moving office locations. Changing life situations. Opening up new markets as a business. Changing policy. The mental and emotional health of a company is no less delicate than that of a family. The reward for cultivating it may be just as great.

Thoughtfulness

If design is one of the primary lenses through which we view Cotton Bureau, thoughtfulness may be the other. No decision is taken lightly. To the best of our ability, every consequence is considered. It’s an angsty, exhausting process. “Be careful and deliberate” is certainly no “move fast and break things” as far as slogans go, but it’s who we are. If job hopping every few years is your thing, if growth is more important than sustainability to you, if you prefer the speed of life in New York or San Francisco, if acting now and asking permission later is your mode of operation, if your attitude is that you miss all the shots you don’t take, you might not like our style. If this all sounds like an abundance of caution, we disagree. Cotton Bureau lives right on the edge in many ways, but the costs and benefits of moving up to (or over) that edge are never underestimated.

Our Story

A few weeks ago we introduced something of a mission statement. It’s not a coincidence that much of what I just wrote can be found there.

Success for us — and we think this is something every company should be required to state publicly — is building a sustainable company that helps designers and communities meet their financial, practical, and creative needs (at least when it comes to selling t-shirts and other odds and ends).

Zoom, enhance:

Success for us is building a sustainable company that helps designers and communities meet their financial, practical, and creative needs.

We started Cotton Bureau three years ago with a business model (curated, limited time only, pre-0rder t-shirts), a good idea of who we were as a team, and a very blurry concept of what exactly it was we stood for as a company. Today, we know what matters to us. We’re not trying to make a dent in the universe. We’re here to make a living by enabling great design, by helping communities, by having fun, and by maintaining our commitment to the principles we value.

If we can help you, submit a design and become part of that story.

In the fine tradition of, uhm, Bill Simmons, we’d like to share the origin story of At Large.

Naming is both more and less important than you think it is. For us, without a name, we have a hard time moving forward. It isn’t real until it’s been named, and naming is something we take a lot of pride in, as evidenced by the very fond feelings we still have for our former selves, Full Stop and United Pixelworkers, as well as our current incarnation, Cotton Bureau.

You’re probably familiar with the finer points of naming. A name should be easy to spell, memorable, meaningful, and, most importantly, somewhat available wherever you intend for it to reside. It doesn’t have to tick all of the boxes, but typically the more of them it can cross off the list, the better. In addition to those criteria, there’s one other that we’re guilty of incorporating more often than not: our favorite names are usually puns. Our first company blog was Full Disclosure. We even had a second, now defunct alter ego blog called “Full Exposure”. The Cotton Bureau Tumblr is Tumble Dry and the designer interview series, “Freshly Laundered”. It’s very possible we take our puns to unhealthy levels. If you need more of that, you’ll love us on Twitter.

So, why “At Large”? First, Medium publications require names, and, as with Tumblr, we thought playing off the host’s name made sense. Second, sizing is an essential part of t-shirt buying. When you combine those two, you can see how we ended up where we are. We think the name is a good… fit. Now that we all have our groans out of the way, there are a few other aspects of the name that appealed to us. It wasn’t too obvious. (As much as we love a good play on words, we prefer them to stay out of the way, if possible.) It’s easy to spell, remember, share, etc. And, bringing it full circle, “at large” is a common designation for someone in the publishing industry that contributes in an irregular, loosely defined way. That suits us, as we like our editorial freedom.

Before you go, we thought you might enjoy some of the names that didn’t make the cut. Some of these are better or more completely fleshed out than others.

• Thread / Threadbare
• Fabric
• Weave
• 100% Cotton
• Blend
• Fit
• Fiber
• Fit & Fiber
• Extra Large / Extra Small
• Ravel / Unraveled
• Bleach / Unbleached
• Raw
• Cloth
• Whole Cloth
• Raw Cloth
• Textile
• Unbleached Raw
• Off the Cuff
• Back of the Drawer

Anyway, welcome to At Large!

Please bear with me. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything substantial, anything that presumes to represent the company I co-founded. I am therefore falling back on the old crutch of writers everywhere: writing about the process of writing. I wish there was another way.

We (Jay and I) hold our writing to a high standard, an impossible standard, really. We sweat every word; and not just the words themselves but, more importantly, the meaning behind them and their reason for existing in the first place. Is what we’re writing contrary to something we’ve previously written? Will it still be true this time next year? How will it be received by our friends? Will anyone care? Should anyone care? Does it all hang together? Does it move the perception of Cotton Bureau forward? Was it worth our time? Has someone else already written the same thing but better? Do we even know that what we’re writing is true? These are paralyzing yet indispensable questions. It’s frighteningly easy to puke out quasi-profound aphorisms; hollow, unoriginal, immature, often dangerous advice.

For too long, however, it’s held us back. We have a lot to say. It’s time we started saying it.

To whet your appetite for At Large writing to come, let me start by confessing one more thing: Business is a struggle.

I don’t know how else to put it. Despite being together for 6.5 years, Jay and I still look at each other every day and wonder why we do it, whether we’ve overlooked some essential detail that would double our revenue and halve our expenses. We live and work in Pittsburgh when it seems like the rest of the world is in Brooklyn or Austin or San Francisco or Portland. We used to make money by selling websites. Now we sell t-shirts. We shuttered two successful businesses to work on one marginally more successful business. We watch as startup owners and wannabe startup owners congratulate each other on selling out their users, or, in laughably rare circumstances, their customers. We disagree constantly, about everything. We take turns worrying that whatever mysterious phenomenon has kept us in business this long will just as mysteriously disappear tomorrow. We stare at the list of features we want to add to the site, the bugs that stick out like sore thumbs. We shudder at the endless grind of owner-operatorship.

As hopeless (and ridiculous) as that all sounds, however, we’re still here and still love what we do for one simple reason: our satisfaction is derived from meeting internal not external objectives. Success for us—and we think this is something every company should be required to state publicly—is building a sustainable company that helps designers and communities meet their financial, practical, and creative needs (at least when it comes to selling t-shirts and other odds and ends). It means aligning our business model and values. It means prioritizing people, promoting exceptional graphic design, and speaking up even when we know it won’t be possible to please everyone. It means nurturing and cultivating our relationships with you and, just as important, your relationships with each other. It means soberly evaluating our role in contributing to your fear of missing out and the constant stream of distractions that keep us all from the vast majority of moments in our lives that are infinitely more important than finding the perfectly designed tee. We can (and will) do a better job in all of those areas. That—and not an illustory pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or crushing it or winning—is what motivates us.

We’re not perfect, and Cotton Bureau is very much a work in progress. But we plan on sticking around for a while and making ourselves useful, so you may as well get comfortable.