Apparently, it’s working. Small T-shirt brands grew a combined 20 percent from March 2003 to April 2006, according to a 2006 Wall Street Journal article. Larger designer brands fell more than 12 percent during the same period of time.
Take Chicago-based Threadless T-shirt, which launched threadless.com seven years ago with a similar vote-for-the-best online model, albeit on a national level. Today, according to Threadless publicist Bob Nanna, the site has 500,000 registered users and receives some 100 to 150 submissions each day.
For all its relative success, though, theANTI didn’t set out to take down big-time T-shirt purveyors. When I meet up with Stiles, LaCouture, and a trio of designers — Courtney Garth, The Charles, and Maker (both of whom asked to be referred to by their designer names) — at Big City, in Allston, it’s obvious just how haphazardly their business began.
LaCouture was just a sophomore, and Stiles a freshman when they met six years ago at a rooftop party. Both had a rebellious artistic side. LaCouture recalls running into Stiles at midnight, while he was painting in the middle of the campus quad with chalk he had stolen from a classroom. This was when “the madness began,” writes LaCouture on theANTI’s Web site.
With no money to rent an apartment, and no desire to live at home in Norton, Stiles spent his college years couch-surfing at friends’ houses. He stored his belongings in free student lockers. And when he was 21, he was arrested for spray-painting his name on a bridge above a Worcester highway on Christmas Eve. “That was enough for me to stop,” he says.
So in the summer of 2004, right before his senior year, Stiles scraped together enough money to rent an apartment in the Fenway, where he and LaCouture would crank out their first T-shirts. Everything was an experiment out of the house from there on,” says LaCouture. “Our whole kitchen was converted to a chemical factory.”
Stiles acquired a cast-off halogen lamp (essential to silk-screening). He read anything he could get his hands on about the process. And he built a press out of scraps of wood. LaCouture’s kitchen had become a lab for the fledgling business owners’ mad-scientist-style printing operation.
In 2005, LaCouture designed the first version of theANTI’s Web site, and traveled with Stiles to Boston-area stores to ask them to sell the shirts. This year, they sponsored two successful design contests. “We’ve already outsold last year by seven times,” says Stiles.
Their interest in street art is evident in their often graffiti-like designs — the most popular of which feature local references and landmarks, such as the Prudential Center and the Red Line, or shout-outs to neighborhoods like Mission Hill — and in their choice of designers.
The Charles, who created theANTI’s most recent contest-winning design, is a graffiti artist who uses stickers and wheatpaste as his primary media. Noah Goldman (a/k/a Noah Skillz), the mastermind behind two popular designs for theANTI, is an unemployed-architect-turned-artist who paints cartoon-like figures on found objects, such as cabinet doors, windows, and lights. And then there’s Garth (a/k/a Skunk, as well as LaCouture’s girlfriend), who single-handedly covers the women’s market by readying designs for bags. “I eventually want to do dresses and underwear, too,” she says.
