An Open Letter to Stitcht.com

Remember a couple of years ago we reported on the senseless butchering of vintage tees so their parts could be being transformed in to bed quilts? If you check out the comments section I mentioned contacting the company with a proposal, an email I completely forgot I even wrote until just now. Well, patience is a virtue and my work is done here. If only saving dolphins in Japan was this easy.

On Feb 5, 2009, at 4:18 PM, Jimmy J Wrote

Hello there.

My name is Jimmy J and I speak on behalf of a small portion of the population that covet vintage t-shirts as though they were offspring. Having just discovered a video of your business on The YouTube I had to contact you immediately to voice my concerns. I applaud your green efforts, reducing, reusing, re-purposing – the world needs more businesses like yours. However, your being so green is also making me see red. The truth is you’re also hurting the ones we love. I don’t even want to imagine how many wonderful vintage t-shirts you have butchered, it brings a tear to my eye.

I am willing to forgive, and forget, but I ask a small favor of you. If you agree, I’m even willing to promote your services.

I ask that when you accept a job that includes t-shirts of value, that you notify your customer the collectible nature of some of these garments. At such time you could suggest they don’t cut them and keep them intact. I have been selling vintage t-shirts for years on eBay, and I will agree to sell the t-shirt for them for FREE and waive my regular consignment fee. All they would have to do is pay a few dollars to ship it to me, and cover the fees for me to post it, and they can expect payment for the full amount of the profits. My goal here is to preserve vintage t-shirts, so I am willing to waive my regular 30% commission in an effort to save some wonderful t-shirts.

If they say no, at least we tried – and the bad vintage t-shirt karma will be on their hands only. Yes, bad vintage t-shirt karma exists, be warned, the 50/50 poly-cotton gods are unforgiving.

I eagerly await your reply and hope for successful union between us.

Because a vintage t-shirt is a terrible thing to waste.

Sincerely,

JJ

Hi Jimmy J,

Your email was recently brought to my attention after all this time. I wanted to get back to you because while we cannot just put a halt on our lucrative T-shirt quilt business, we have recently redesigned our website to showcase a variety of vintage T-shirts on our blog that for one reason or another were saved. Many of the shirts are from our private collection. I am sure if you saw the majority of the T-shirts we are sent, you would not consider them vintage, have the potential to be vintage or worth saving.

I visited your blog today and I was very impressed with the enthusiasm you have for vintage T-shirts. It may not seem this way to you, but we share this enthusiasm and see our new blog as our way of expressing this. All the shirts featured in our blog remain intact and have no plans to be cut. In fact, we may want to look into selling them as things go on (maybe you can be of assistance with this). If you don’t mind, we may want to reference some of your vintage T-shirt posts in the future.

Hopefully this email will allow you to rest easier knowing that vintage T-shirts are being saved on a daily basis over at stitch’T. If you or your blog followers have any non-vintage T-shirts suitable for putting into a T-shirt quilt, we would gladly hook you guys up with a considerable discount, contest, giveaway, etc.

Best,

Jason
stitch’ T