Article 5: Case Study: Wild Fire Tees

   The article Case Study: Wild Fire Tees, written by Troy DeRose, is about how Austin Buck, co-owner of CoPilot Creative in Colorado Springs got the idea of selling t-shirts to help benefit the wild fires in Colorado and called upon many other design companies to help. This idea originally came from a design company in Texas called AIRSHP who designed t-shirts to also help benefit the wildfire relief in Texas. With no prescribed budget and no research, just the model of the Texas business who previously made benefit tees, the team was only expecting to sell 200 to 300 shirts, but ended up selling more than $600,000 dollars worth of shirts. The team had no strategy besides first, simply wanting to make a great design on a shirt and second, to make a great-looking, good-quality shirt that people would love. Some challenges they faced were having to scale up the project because of the amount of sales they had, prove that they were a legitimate cause to Twitter and PayPal, and have to find other companies to supply them with shirts after literally causing Hanes to sell out of some sizes and colors. Overall the project was effective and the team felt that "What we believed, which was confirmed by the orders, is that great design matters, period."
      I think that this statement is the most important sentence in the article because if you have a great design, everyone will want it, and this was proven by not being able to keep a few designs on hand due to a complete sell-out. The designs really matched what the people were feeling.  People wanted designs that commemorated this tragic event, but also represented the way their community rallied together. this was a perfect way to help a good cause.