Why we Love a Good T-shirt

At Hager-vor, we love a good t-shirt. Long sleeved or short sleeved; subtle text design or colourful graphics. It doesn’t matter. We love them all. And with Cornwall quickly warming up, we’re confident t-shirt season is very nearly upon us. But we’re not the only ones. In the past few weeks, we’ve been seeing more and more people braving the weather and ditching the jackets in favour of a t-shirt.

T-shirts are one of those few wardrobe items that you wear all year round. They don’t get pushed to the side when it’s time to layer up, nor do they get shunned when you no longer need a jacket. And for us, this is what makes our design process so fun. We’re able to go a little more ‘out there’ with the designs we put on tees and it allows us to some more creative freedom. But we also have to be mindful that not everyone is going to want a t-shirt covered in graphics. 

So here are our three predominant t-shirt styles, and why we think each one of them is just as great as the next.

Text logo

The minimal designs are for when we want to tone things back a bit and let the brand name or logo do the talking. Our unique name means that people will often stop and ask about what it means and how to pronounce it. But with that, it means the branding has to be on-point. One of our best-sellers is our Vor Text tee; with the minimal branding having a strong impact. We’ve just introduced two new colourways in the tee, bringing the total to five, and we still can’t decide on a favourite! 

The Vor Text tee in all five colours

For a slightly different approach to the Vor Text, we have the Counter Vor. There are definitely creative limitations when it comes to using minimal text, but we think this is a nice approach. It’s one of those tees that makes you look twice, and is one that is best appreciated up close.

Graphic

Many of our t-shirts ride the gap between a minimal text design and a graphic design. The Godrevy tee — again, with some new colours in stock — utilises text as an element in the graphic. The text forming a circle around the Hager-vor name starts to look less like text the further away you are. And we think it’s more in the graphic camp than the text camp. However, graphic tees often offer something a little extra. 

The Godrevy tees in all five colours

They’re where we choose to let our creativity flourish. But, with graphic tees, there’s a lot more to consider when we design them. What colours work best? What size works best? Is there too much going on? Of course, there are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. But being as we are, everything has to be perfect. Our current tee of the month, the Glide, is a perfect example of this. We could have chosen to print in black or white, but we think the blues elevate the tees to another level.

Surfer in the Sun (left), Drop Knee (centre), Mirror (right)

But if you’re looking for a more graphic based tee, we have some of them as well. The Surfer in the Sun, Drop Knee, and Mirror are all designs that have been popular for years and show no signs of slowing. The common theme between them all is the decision to have the graphic only on the back, in contrast to some of our more recent designs. We think that all of these designs need to be big to be appreciated fully. The decision was then made to have a text logo on the front — what we are now affectionately calling the classic text. We feel the subtlety of the text on the front is necessary to not draw too much attention from the back design.

Long sleeve

Finally, we have long sleeves — a very new addition to Hager-vor, but one that is already selling incredibly. With the Cornish weather quickly changing throughout the day, a long sleeved t-shirt is often the perfect choice. Sitting right in that gap between a regular tee and a thin jumper, it provides the best of both worlds. For now, we have chosen our popular Bay design to feature on the long sleeve, but we’re always testing prints, both new and current designs.

Bay long sleeve tees

The design process of a long sleeve is similar to a crew neck — there’s a lot of room to play with, but it can easily be overdone. We think the Bay design sits perfectly on it, and hopefully it won’t be long before we have more designs.

Do you love t-shirts as much as we do? Head over to our social media channels and tell us which designs you tend to be drawn towards.