In the fall of 2014, I heard from a guy named Bryan Molloy, who was a graphic designer for a T-shirt company called Teespring. He said he was a Uni Watch fan and offered to design a shirt that we could sell on the Teespring website.
At that point, I had barely done any Uni Watch merchandising, in part because I was too busy and also because I didn’t want to just put lots of junk out into the world. But the more I talked with Bryan, the more I started envisioning a line of T-shirts that would be more of a fun art project, not just a merch dump.
Bry and I eventually settled on idea of a monthly series of limited-edition shirts that would each be based on a baseball team’s uniform portfolio. We called it the Uni Watch T-shirt Club, came up with a simple logo that would serve as our “sleeve patch” (shown above) and then came up with designs for each month of the 2015 calendar year, like so:
January: Home Whites
February: Batting Practice
March: St. Patrick’s Day
April: Jackie Robinson Day
May: Cinco de Mayo
June: Black for Black’s Sake
July: Stars and Stripes
July (alternate): Canada Day
August: Road Grey
September: Solid-Colored Alternate
October: Powder Blue
November: Tequila Sunrise
December: Ugly Sweater
The project was popular with the readership and very creatively satisfying. It also marked the start of a long friendship and collaborative partnership between myself and Bryan Molloy that continues to this day. Along the way, Bryan created Uni Watch’s familiar “winged stirrup” logo; you can learn more about that here.