I love schwag. Who doesn’t? Tee-shirts especially. So I’ve been looking around for a good supplier of shirts and working on a spiffy design. I wanted to make a shirt people would actually want to wear, otherwise why go through the effort and expense? What I finally came up with is pictured over there on the right. Click on it to enlarge it and see other pictures.

Want one? It’s Yours!

You can get one for free by emailing me using the form at the end of this post.

Best of all, if you send me a picture of yourself wearing the shirt out and about, hopefully having a great time, I’ll add you to our review samples mailing list and you’ll get a free bottle of Capozzi Pinot Noir sent to you for review when our inaugural vintage is released (a couple conditions apply).

The Shirt

Just like everything we strive to do at Capozzi, the shirt is high quality and, perhaps just as importantly, it has an interesting story. This is not just your standard Cafe Press rag with a crappy silk screen. Our shirt is one of the softest, smoothest, best-looking organic cotton T-shirts available. I sense you doubting me. You shouldn’t. Here are some details:

• The shirt is made from 100% USDA Certified Organic Cotton, which means that no pesticides were used in farming it. This was very important to us, and hopefully you, considering the extreme amounts used in the conventional production of cotton.
• The company that produces the shirt, American Apparel based in LA, is the antithesis of a sweatshop. AA pays its employees the highest wages in the garment industry.
• In addition AA has 5 massage therapists on staff available to workers for free, a bike lending program, paid days off, and natural light in its factory.
• They are able to afford to pay for all of this in the hyper competitive garment industry by being vertically integrated and selling direct to customers through their retail shops. Increasing margins by cutting out the middle man…sounds remarkably familiar!
• Though they’re now the largest American garment maker, AA is still very agile. In an interview with Charlie Rose, the founder of AA, Dov Charney, says that it can take as little as a week for a clothing concept to go from the drawing board to retail in Tokyo due to their nimbleness.
• They were the first real bricks and mortar retailer to set up a virtual shop in Second Life, which I think is pretty cool.

All of which = excellent tee shirt. No company or man is perfect however, and there is a dark side to AA. Dov seems to have a thing with sleeping with his staffers, and this has lead to a number of sexual harassment lawsuits. Two suits were dropped but a third is still pending.

If Dov were found guilty of harassment I’d think twice about dealing with AA, but right now they are just allegations. Benefit of the doubt and all that. It might help though, and I’m just spit-balling here, if he didn’t hold company meetings in his underwear (see picture). A quote from the Inc. article pretty much says it all:

…the 36-year-old proprietor of one of the hottest brands in fashion bears a strong resemblance to a young Gabe Kotter with a whiff of Vincent Gallo. He is also commonly said to look like a 1970s pornographer, and that is the sort of comparison that makes him very, very happy.

And there we are.

Good product, good quality. Good taste? Debatable. Good story? Uncontestable.

The Wine

As I mentioned, if you take a photo of yourself out having a good time in the shirt and send it back to me, I’ll not only post your pic on the blog and write about you, I’ll also send you a bottle of our Pinot Noir upon release for you to review. There are three conditions:

• You must be 21 or over.
• At some point you will need to have a blog. The law doesn’t permit me to give wine away to strangers, but I can send out review samples. Therefore you’ll need a platform to conduct your review for all this to be completely above board and kosher. If you don’t have a blog and want to start one, I highly recommend creating a WordPress hosted account (its free).
• Space is limited. We’ll be selling our wine for around $45 a bottle so the costs are non trivial. Depending on the response I will probably not be able to accommodate everyone, so get your picture in to me ASAP.

UPDATE: We’re all sold out! Thanks for the great response!