“Ethically made” gets used a lot, but what does it mean to us?
It means we make sure workers and our communities are taken into account at every step of the process. We are a unionized shop that often works with other unionized shops. We are a member of the Fair Labor Association, source our products from many domestic suppliers, and our international suppliers are certified sweatshop-free.
Ethically Made, Designed, & Printed – RAYGUN
We finally have a merch store featuring two simple t-shirt designs and a sticker of our power wheelchair with rainbow umbrella logo.
We chose Raygun Custom for printing and fulfillment. They are an ethical shop aligned with our values. Except for kid sizes, the t-shirts are USA made. The foreign made shirts are sweatshop free. All shirts and stickers are printed in the US by union labor. You can see a breakdown of what’s made where and how on their page about ethically making.
We went with two simple t-shirt designs.
The first features our Stimpunks Umbrella logo in white on a black background.
You can read about the inspiration behind our umbrella logo on our brand identity page.
We also wanted to provide a design without our branding. We never trademarked “Stimpunks”. Even though we independently conceived of and popularized the term (there were probably others before us), “Stimpunks” belongs to the community. We don’t want to make it proprietary to us.
So, we opted for a plain text wordmark shirt (just the word “Stimpunks”). We used a duo space font for a typewriter, computer terminal, code editor feel to evoke the DIY culture of punk and disability communities.
In contrast to proportional fonts that communicate “this is almost done” monospace fonts suggest “this text is work in progress.” It is the more honest typographic choice for a text that is not ready to publish.
From Monospace to Duospace: In Search of the perfect writing font
For our first sticker, we chose our power wheelchair with rainbow logo umbrella.
BTW, that’s a vector drawing of Ryan’s actual wheelchair.
Stimpunks Foundation makes $5 off each shirt.