Hello, everyone. Welcome to Feature Friday #011, our first in 2024, featuring friend of the site Todd Radom. Check out Todd’s incredible work over the years on his website. You can keep up with him on Twitter and Instagram. You might also like his tribute to Cuban baseball on Cotton Bureau.

Todd! It’s good to finally catch up with you. Before we get into your prolific career in sports branding, I just have to ask: what do you think of the NBA City Edition uniforms for this year?

I hate being a hater, but there’s more bad than good here. This is what happens when the mandate is one of constant churn, a revolving cycle of change which distances many teams from their familiar core looks. Like many, I see game highlights on my phone and wonder, “who are these teams?” The novelty that surrounded this program has abated, and I wonder how it moves forward.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but sports is a business and being a business means constant pressure to not just make money but make more money than the year before. The original city editions were fun. Time to move on, I guess.

While we’re talking NBA, the In-Season Tournament courts have been a lightning rod for design criticism. Where do you weigh in?

I’ll start by saying that I have created colorful, unconventional courts for the BIG3 for several years now. Theirs is a half court, a more forgiving canvas for bold blocks of color, and it goes without saying that some of the NBA courts look great, while some are an assault on the eyeballs. The idea here is a good one–a graphic approach that has been done before (the classic Robert Indiana-designed Mecca court in Milwaukee.) Ultimately, court design is about form and function, and form sometimes needs to take a step back. I applaud the Association for doing something different here, if their intent was to get people’s attention they have succeeded.

Wow, I didn’t realize how extensive your involvement was with the Big 3.

Personally I enjoy the creative license the NBA took. They weren’t the first — you mentioned the Big 3, and we’ve seen some adventurous college football fields (Boise State) and basketball courts (Oregon) — but if I had to guess, we’re going to see more from the NBA and others now that the seal has been broken. Let’s just hope we can find a happy medium between creativity and clarity in the mold of that Robert Indiana court.

Meanwhile in baseball, the big uniform news is… narrower plackets? The devil’s always in the details, I suppose. When you’re working with teams and leagues, how much are you taking physical materials and other real world production constraints into consideration as you work through design concepts?

My Big3 work represents the most immersive creative collaboration of my long career, and it’s constant and ongoing.

The new Nike MLB template is going to take some getting used to. Teams like the Tigers and Red Sox have more or less looked the same for almost a century–the use of what we have come to know as a standard sized placket dates back even earlier. To answer your question, some details need to be designed to fit such constrains, while others do not. A half inch difference in the size of a sleeve patch or a uniform number makes no difference, but thinking about the dimensions of uniform trim, for example, can make a huge difference when it comes to envisioning the final product.

Physical media constraints are a frustrating but I think ultimately enjoyable puzzle for designers. We’ve seen that first-hand as we’ve worked with designers on transitioning ideas that were originally conceived for screenprinted or DTG t-shirts to the much chunkier and restrictive world of embroidered hats.

With your portfolio ranging from Super Bowl logos to MLB identities to the full league challenge of BIG3 and beyond, is there a particular area that you are hoping to explore in the future? Maybe if we speak it into existence you could be involved with the 2026 USMNT World Cup kit?

Dimensional puff embroidery has changed things. Abundant detail should be carefully considered, knowing that the final intended results may be difficult to achieve.

In terms of what’s next, I will have a couple of milestone, “bucket list” things to share in 2024, things that I couldn’t have imagined when I began this creative journey all those years ago. Stay tuned.

We will! Can’t wait to see what qualifies as a bucket list project given what you’ve already accomplished.

I’m sure you’re familiar with Bill Simmons’ imaginary sports czar position where the government decides one day to nationalize all sports leagues and give one person full authority over all decision making. If this pretend sports czar empowered you to make all decisions regarding uniforms, branding, and media, what kind of changes would you institute in your first year in office?

- Always start with “why are we doing this or making this change?”
- Be mindful of the balance between form and function
- Know that we live in a profoundly different world than we did in 2017, 2007, or 1907. Brands evolve, fans and customers evolve. Appealing to something that worked in the past offers no guarantee of future success.
- Sports is fun. What we do should reflect that.

Speaking of the world changing, let’s wrap this conversation up with a look at where things are right now in the sports graphic design universe and where they might be going.

A lot of your work is firmly anchored in the physical world. As a kid who grew up watching sports and collecting trading cards, I can appreciate both the fun of opening, holding, and preserving a tangible artifact as well as the reality that sports memorabilia is a massive industry with a lot of money attached. How do you think the introduction of officially licensed NFTs (like NBA Top Shot) fits into the sports business and design space? Are NFTs something you have any personal or professional interest in?

No interest whatsoever. Crypto feelings aside, I want to connect with actual, tangible objects, not another image in my phone.

Based on the complete collapse of the NFT bubble, you’re probably not alone. A lot of speculation, very little genuine enthusiasm.

Okay, for real, last question. I have to ask because it’s the single most transformative event in graphic design since Photoshop… what do you think of generative AI? Legality aside, why should someone work with Todd Radom the person instead of Bot Radom?

It’s a great question, and it’s one that the world is reckoning with in real time. We do know that generative AI is rapidly evolving; as someone said early last year, “this is the worst it’s ever gonna look.” Being able to eliminate a background in Photoshop with one click is truly astounding. But ultimately, and it’s easier for me to say this at this point in my career than when I witnessed the adoption of Photoshop and friends: You are getting me, my knowledge, my technical skills, and my experience as an actual living breathing human being who has a lifetime of creative experience, which includes making well-informed instinctive decisions on composition, color, balance, and harmonious use of elements, in addition to strategy and four decades of production knowledge. I do worry about the continual devaluation of creativity going forward and I remember vising the late Milton Glaser at his New York office, where the following motto was inscribed above the front door: “Art is Work."

Thank you so much for your time, Todd!

Happy New Year. Let’s have a quick chat about what Cotton Bureau was able to accomplish (or not accomplish) in 2023 and where we hope to go in 2024.

The Audit. 💼

On March 28, 2023 Cotton Bureau received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service advising us that our returns for 2020 and 2021 were “selected for examination”.

If the IRS ever decides to, for no particular reason, review your tax returns, you might think that what really matters at the end of the day is that your returns were filed accurately. You would be correct, of course, and you will be very thankful that you have been diligent about doing it The Right Way all these years, but what you will quickly find out is that the auditor does not care whether your returns were accurate. All they care about is requiring you to prove that they are correct in tedious, painful, and incomprehensible detail.

Your particular IRS agent might not understand how ecommerce businesses work and insist that you explain it to them from first principles. How, for example, do you know that the person who bought the t-shirt actually received the t-shirt? When you politely suggest that they talk to their compatriots at the United States Postal Service about that, they are not amused.

For six months, you, your expensive (and lovely!) Certified Public Accountants, and the government’s appointed inquisitor will debate the finer points of the law surrounding such things as receipts for lunch at the local pizza place and whether money transferred between bank accounts via well known and banal mechanisms like ACH count as revenue or, just, you know, relocating money to a different account.

Thankfully after innumerable conversations, the G Men and Women will begrudgingly admit that, yes, in fact you do run a perfectly legitimate business, and that, other than a difference of opinion about whether certain expenses can be entirely substantiated which is not worth appealing because it will just cost you more money, you are Good. You will then cut a check to the government for less than you paid your accountants in the last half year complying with endless nonsensical document requests printed on honest-to-goodness-I-am-not-making-this-up pieces of paper, and everyone will go their merry way to celebrate Christmas in Peace.

Meanwhile…

A Year of Shipping. 🚀

Life goes on. While [redacted] was squinting at numbers and quibbling about nachos, we were busy as bees building a better business. If you missed our emails or just can’t recall (to be honest, we can barely remember ourselves) here’s a quick chronological recap of what we shipped in 2023.

Stock Products for All — January
Cotton Bureau accumulated quite a pile of stock products over the years. We loved helping people sell and ship their goods, but costs were adding up. We needed to make some changes to make sure that part of the business was sustainable going forward. We put together a lightweight billing system and added a new Pro tier for anyone who wanted to sell items that were neither on demand nor pre-order campaigns. We’re happy to report that’s worked out perfectly and no changes are needed to that system for 2024. If you have enamel pins or posters or anything else you would like to add to your store, please get in touch.

Price Changes — January
Everyone’s least favorite topic, surely, and ours as well. In early 2023 it seemed like inflation was just about done. We took a look at our prices and adjusted them as necessary to continue operating a healthy company. Thankfully that trend continued, prices stabilized, and we do not see any areas that need to be addressed in 2024.

New Profile Link Options — February
The self-combustion of Twitter prompted us to sit down and review which social networks were available to Cotton Bureau profiles. We were able to add official support for Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Dribbble, Behance, Github, Patreon, and Mastodon. Later in 2023 we added Threads and LinkedIn as well.

New and Improved Sales Reports — February
Still below standard if we’re being honest, we were able to improve account analytics slightly with aggregated sales data on a per product basis. We intended to get back to that later in the year to provide even more ways to slice and dice the data, but in a recurring theme, we ran out of time. It’s safe to say that addressing creator dashboards is again on our list for 2024.

On Demand Embroidered Hats — April
Genuinely a thrill for us, we’ve embroidered tons of hats over the years, but doing it on demand was only a dream until now. We were able to team up with the same people who screenprinted every Cotton Bureau shirt and embroidered every Cotton Bureau hat to offer a solid thread color palette and a strong mix of hat styles and colors available on demand. It would be several months before we could expand the available styles and colors and make the whole thing self-serve, but embroidered hats on demand 1.0 was a huge milestone for us and something we remain proud to have shipped in 2023.

Updated Mockup Rendering — May
We’ll spare you the technical mumbo jumbo. Just know that before May 2023 every mockup image on Cotton Bureau had to be generated at the time of product creation. That led to a solution that required a lot of hard drive space to store images and a lot of processing any time changes to products needed to be made (see, for example, adding long-sleeve tees like we did in December). The new system of on demand mockup generation in the browser was more complicated to implement but gave us infinitely more flexibility and significantly reduced our overall operational cost for serving images. It’s something that under ideal circumstances is completely invisible. We have a few tweaks that we would like to make, but overall the system worked exactly as intended. We are quite happy with the results.

Cotton Bureau’s 10th Birthday — June
When we started our little web design agency Full Stop in 2009, it was a real fools-rush-in-where-angels-fear-to-tread situation. We knew we were good at making websites, and we were confident we could run a better business than the one we were leaving. We were right about the websites, and, so far, we’ve been right about running a business as well. (Our alma mater went belly up a few years after we walked.) While Cotton Bureau itself didn’t start cooking until 2013, the DNA was all there from the beginning. It’s incredibly humbling to still be here doing this lo these many years later. Thank you for indulging a little celebration from time to time. We received many kind messages on the occasion of our company launch anniversary, and we appreciate every one.

P.S. You can still buy a commemorative metal card if you like. We may have overestimated how many people love Cotton Bureau as much as we do.

Feature Friday Kickoff — June
Getting back to something else we love, 2023 saw the reboot of our series of designer interviews. Internally, our goal was to ship a new interview every two weeks. We ended up with 10 complete which, while a little below where we wanted to be, is still quite respectable. Here’s the full list if you missed one: Virginia Poltrack, Steve Habersang, Amanda Weedmark, Tim Van Damme, Christopher Michon, Andrew Griswold, Justin Van Genderen, Sheri Roloff, Josh Hara, and Chiara Mensa.

We’ve got plenty more lined up for 2024. If you know someone that would make a good interviewee, tell us!

Referral Codes — July
So, look, we’re not going to sugarcoat things here. We’ve long wanted to offer a way for people to earn Cotton Bureau credit by helping us spread the word. It seems like a scenario where everyone wins. Plenty of other websites have (presumably) quite successful referral programs. In order to ship an MVP referral program, we decided to rely on the existing discount engine we built. In practice, whether because this is a feature that nobody wants or one that has been inadequately promoted, referral program uptake has been far less than we hoped. If there’s one thing you can say about us though, it might be that we, uh, don’t know when to quit. The referral program isn’t going anywhere. We’ll do our best to improve it and make sure it’s more visible than it has been so far.

If this is the first you are hearing about the referral program, you can get started any time. Just visit the discounts page in your account and find your public referral link.

YouTube Shopping Integration — September
A fairly niche feature, we did add support for connecting Cotton Bureau profiles to YouTube in September. The story behind YouTube finally granting us access is epic and sadly just another of the many painful examples we have of working with large companies.

If you have a YouTube channel with monetization turned on, email us with your channel ID to get connected. Hopefully we can find a few minutes to make that self-serve in 2024.

Self-Serve Embroidery on Demand — November
Just in time for holidays, on demand embroidered hats can now be created as easily as t-shirts and phone cases. It’s our third official self-serve on demand product. In concert with releasing the self-serve tool, we more than doubled the number of available colors and styles. On demand hats are now a true Cotton Bureau product. We had originally expected to ship support in the first half of the year. As with everything in life, double the amount of time you think it will take. Then double it again and you will still be short. From simulating stitching and warping to getting all the necessary pieces in place for the API, it was quite a process.

Long-Sleeve Tees — December
One final product update for 2023. Long-sleeve tees were one of the most requested apparel types from customers. While adding support for long-sleeve tees is not particularly challenging technically, it did help to have laid the foundation for it with the on demand mockup image change we made earlier in the year. Long-sleeve tees immediately become one of our best sellers, which makes us think… maybe we should add more shirt styles? 🤔

Near Misses in 2023 / Plans for 2024. 📆

Looking back on last year, we hit about 70% of the goals we set for ourselves. That’s really not bad. Still, the plans that didn’t quite come through somehow take on a bigger aspect in our memory than the ones that did. We had every intention of releasing on demand drinkware. We fully expected to add support for multiple print locations and on demand totes. We made excellent progress on some of those. If you read the recap above though, you’ll see that for the second half of the year announcements slowed considerably. Part of that is simply the reality that pushing a project across the finish line elides all of the work that came before it. Even if a project is 80% complete, it doesn’t exist yet for public consumption, so we can’t take any credit. The other simple fact is that life gets in the way. There was paternity leave and summer vacations and holiday madness. The second half of the year just beats you down and the best laid plans seem destined to go awry.

So, here we are. The Year of Our Lord 2024 has arrived. It is positively deranged to talk too much about the future. It always looks different than you would like and never arrives when expected. Yet, well, we’ll let you in on a few secrets. Maybe some of these happen this year, maybe some happen next year, inevitably some are even further away or may never happen at all.

There’s a whole world of on demand products waiting to be added beyond what we have already. The trick is finding the right partner to execute them with the quality and consistency that we expect. We’re actively evaluating several new exciting opportunities, and there are actually quite a lot of products we have yet to tap into from our existing partners. In no particular order, we’re looking at stickers, towels, totes, mugs, insulated bottles, blankets, and prints, as well as more embroidery and apparel options. If any of those sound interesting to you — or we missed something critical, please reply to this email and let us know what you like. We won’t necessarily be able to juggle the schedule as we’re already shipping as quickly as we can, but it makes a huge difference for us to know what you are thinking.

Other than new products, we will have some infrastructure needs to prioritize. Various code libraries are approaching end of life and need to be updated. Our mailing list provider costs too much and does too little. We’re also painfully aware that account tools need to be improved. We would love to make more features like discount creation and pre-order campaigns self-serve. To be honest, the list is quite a bit longer than we can possibly address. Here’s to another year though of chipping away and making things a little bit better every day.

End Notes. 🎬

We’d like to take one last opportunity to thank you before we move on to the business of 2024. Thank you for working with us. Cotton Bureau only exists and has only ever existed because we help people solve a problem. The problem is simply one of getting stuff made and getting it where it needs to go. We don’t personally make the things, we work with other people who do that. We don’t deliver the things, we trust USPS and FedEx to do that.

We don’t bring the people to Cotton Bureau, we don’t design the shirts, hats, and phone cases. We do very little other than provide a safe and reliable platform to take care of the irritating logistics of connecting people to each other. Without you doing the hard work of designing products that people want to buy and building communities that want to support your effort, our solution is useless. We very much enjoy doing what we do and hope to continue doing it for a long time, so thank you for trusting us to be your partner in making people happy.

Welcome to the 2023 Cotton Bureau Holiday Gift Guide!

While Cotton Bureau is a great place to start or finish your shopping, we would love to highlight some of the incredible designers, artists, and communities that we have had the pleasure of working with over the years.

If you are still looking for a great gift for a friend or family member, you could do a lot worse than something from this year’s guide.

Outdoors

Entertainment

Music

Food

Books

Newsletters

That’s a wrap on this year’s gift guide! Hope you found the perfect gift for your friend, father, neighbor, office mate, or secret admiree (look it’s a word if we say it is). Today and tomorrow are your last chance to pick up something from Cotton Bureau before the chances of it arriving before Christmas hit ~zero.

Just in time for winter weather we’ve got cozy looooong sleeve shirts live on the site. You don’t have to do anything (other than let people know). All products on the site using black, navy, charcoal, grey, white, or maroon color bundles have been automatically updated to include the new styles.

After a bit of internal dialogue, we ended up going with the Bella + Canvas 3501 for these. They’re a bit roomier than the comparable Next Level style (3601) and have a nice cuffed sleeve that just feels right. We’d love to expand the color range next year, but we’re just happy to finally make something on this front happen at all. Like everything else we do, it’s been a long time coming and has a ways to go. Better late than never though, right?