The History of the Go Slow Tropical Shirt
In case you are curious enough to dig into the deepest reaches of the site and end up here, well. . . here you are.
How did we come up with the Go Slow Tropical Shirt?
We started by trying to sell Hawaiian Shirts. You know, the traditional kind with lots of flowers or maybe a nice ocean scene with waves and tiny hula girls. Maybe a few vintage surfer cars on them and ukuleles. Gotta have the ukuleles.
Anyway, everywhere we looked there were variations of the same theme. Hundreds of patterns. Thousands of patterns. I kid you not, there must be 20 or 30 thousand different Hawaiian Shirt patterns out there. How do you stand out with all of that going on?
Bali
About that time, I was introduced to some local artisans in and around Bali that were practicing the centuries cloth decorating technique of batik. The images were rough, coarsely laid out and maddeningly inconsistent. I loved it.
We put out our first batik designs right next to the traditional Hawaiian shirt designs and sold twice as many of the bright and colorful batiks. We tried our own designs, we mixed in existing colors and tried new fabrics. We changed the cut from the "pajama collar" back to a more traditional shirt cut. We brought the sizing down from the super large fit to a more traditional, vintage fit.
It wasn't long before we realized - these really aren't what you think of when you look for "Hawaiian Shirts". They could be called Tropical Shirts or we could make up our own name. Everyone else does it.
The Go Slow Tropical Shirt was born.
Mad Gringo can now claim fame and fortune all over the Big Island of Omahahu and sometimes I get free drinks from my friends.
That, and I have a statue of a shaman biting the tail off a snake. At least I have that going for me.
