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Our Happiness Hustler, Eleen Hsu, talks DH:shop and how our Smile Collection tees help us deliver happiness around the globe.
What inspired the creation of the DH Smile T-shirt Collection?
(Eleen) We wanted to create something that would enable us to spread the message of Delivering Happiness and nudging the world to a happier place. T-shirts make a great canvas for this and are a way for our community to deliver happiness to anyone who sees them. The DH Smile Collection is a blend of good design on high-quality, comfortable tees in fashionable shapes and of course simple but thoughtful messaging to inspire people to make a positive difference in the world . . . one t-shirt at a time.
Who works on the tees?
The DH:shop team has a blast working on these tees. There's Sindy our "Creative Cookie," Fadh our "Chief Pixelator," and me (Eleen), our "Happiness Hustler."
What is the creative process like for making a smiling tee?
It's a fun, collaborative process to develop these tees. (It'd better be, right? It's the Smile Collection, after all!) We start off by brainstorming on the actual messages we'd like to focus on, just in terms of words. Then, we get feedback from the team as a whole on what resonates with them.
Time to start designing! Sindy and Fadh are our design extraordinaires, and they often take the first crack at a few concepts for each message. Then the three of us go through each one.
Sometimes we nail a design on the first try and the next steps are just about refining -- tweaking colors, dimensions, fonts. Other times it's not so slam dunk, and we may go through several rounds of re-thinking and re-concepting before the final design starts to take shape.
Once our designs are in place, it's time to open it up for more feedback from the team. This can be nerve-wracking after having spent so much time on each design, but inevitably the process always makes each design that much stronger, more personal and/or meaningful.
What's something people might find surprising about the production process?
I think many might assume that it's a much easier and faster process than it actually is. Once a design is complete, it gets spec'd out to be a detailed blueprint for the screenprinting team. We meticulously choose each and every element for each and every shirt: from t-shirt style, color and fabric, to label style and placement, to ink color, ink type, design placement and dimensions. We then work closely with our screenprinter to produce a few samples and refine colors and placement before we go to production with the rest of the batch.
How many smiles has this collection created?
A lot! That's the thing about this collection. We know that happiness is contagious, and we designed this line to bring a smile to people's faces. One thing leads to another, and pretty soon you've got a whole lot of smiling people! We've shipped orders to places as near as right here in the San Francisco Bay Area to as far as Russia! It's nice to think that people are delivering happiness the world over.
Any advice on how to start spreading a smile?
You bet! Just visit our shop!
