We made merchandise for Da Weasel (without knowing it...)

Da Weasel announced on 13 July 2019 that they would be reuniting for a special concert at the next edition of NOS Alive (2020). This triggered a media firestorm the like of which had not been seen in Portugal for a long time and Maudlin Merchandise found itself right at the epicentre of this fantastic adventure.

By now we had known for about a month that we were going to produce merchandise for an artist. We didn't know who, we didn't know images or quantities. All we knew was that an agency had booked us for a week of silk-screen production for a secret project and that we couldn't find out until the 13th in the evening. We were excited about the opportunity, although there was also a lot of concern as we knew that it would be a project that would be on pre-sale for only 72 hours (13.07 to 16.07) before the order was placed and the quantities garmented were considerable for the (short) time the merchandise would be on sale.

Da Weasel T-Shirts

In a situation of this scale, there is a huge logistical burden that needs to be taken into account. The clients wanted a very specific t-shirt and cap, which meant we had to import the items to be screen printed and embroidered. Given the quantity of items ordered, we had one more factor to consider; not everything was available from a single supplier, so we were forced to make two purchases with immediate delivery from two countries and wait (pray) for the remaining items coming from the USA to arrive in time for production.

With a pre-sale of this calibre and in these conditions, you never know what will happen. There are too many external factors that we can't control and the only thing we knew was that we had (literally) pallets of clothes in the warehouse and we didn't know what to do with them until the final orders came in.

Here's everything we didn't know:

  • Will there be a second order? Or a third? We haven't been told if the online shop will be closed after the pre-sales.
  • If there are orders, how often will they be placed and how quickly will they have to be delivered?
  • If the pre-sale doesn't go well, we've booked a week of production for something we might do in two or three days, what do we do the rest of the time?
  • Or if it goes too well, where do we find the time to order and produce the rest of the items in the height of summer?

Simply too many questions. But nothing that an agile company like ours can't handle.

We received the final figures on 16 July, first thing in the morning. It was the baptism of fire for a new employee who joined the company on the same day and whose job was precisely to sort clothes. What better task to start with than sorting out the Da Weasel parcels? Lucky!

By now we had received the files from the client, the photolithographs had been taken and the frames opened to put the work on the machine. Order forms made, T-shirts separated, machines set up and half a company "booked" to work exclusively for Da Weasel, one of my teenage bands. The soundtrack?

Two jobs of thousands of T-shirts each and another of hundreds of cloth bags to be made in a very short space of time meant that we had to manage production with tweezers, making a perfect bridge between the screen printing department and the finishing department for the application of thousands of decorated labels, but with the effort and dedication of the best team in the industry, we successfully finished an extremely complicated job with incredible quality. We're sure that Da Weasel and the agency that hired us were extremely satisfied with the final result, delivered on time and with the quality that characterises us.

It should be noted that a few hundred garments only reached us during the active production phase and had to be fitted at the last minute, despite having been ordered weeks in advance. A demonstration that even when everything is planned in advance, logistics can get out of hand.

estampagem têxtil

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