moreTvicar.com ...where the cool tees hang out!

T-shirt company | moreTvicar

It's hard to remember quite how it all began but the site ostensibly grew out of a passion for graphics and great design. We were all interested in cool, underground fashion and had some good contacts with a number of T-shirt labels.

We were also interested in anything Japanese – the culture, the kitsch and the massive creativity. We have a large collection of Japanese toys and are fans of the manga scene.

Some of the all-time great T-shirts come from Japan – cool, quirky and beautifully realised.

We wanted to create a shop selling cool stuff in a cool retro environment. We decided on T-shirts because there is a massive market for them (over 2 billion sold worldwide each year) and there is massive potential and endless possibilities. T-shirts also have a great (romantic?) heritage. They started off life as underwear and then James Dean came along and made the T-shirt dangerous and rebellious and sexy.

When you start to dig around the T-shirt world you start to realise just how big and disparate it is. We have small one-man band labels screen-printing on their mum's kitchen tables and multi-million pound labels selling worldwide. It is this that makes this world so exciting. Anyone can have a go at creating a T-shirt, it is relatively inexpensive and it is quick. T-shirts can comment on the world, they can react to the moment – propaganda on cotton.

We recently issued a Free Paris T-shirt when the poor rich girl was banged up. It quickly generated loads of press and has become a cult collector's favourite.

Anyway, back to the story….

We decided on tees and then we worked on the shop.

We had all had varying degrees of success of shopping online. We wanted the shop to feel safe and accessible, cool – but not too cool. A shop where everyone is welcome.

Our aim was to create the ultimate online T-shirt store, bringing the best T-shirts from around the world under one virtual roof. We were also very clear that we wanted to offer fantastic service; old-fashioned customer service in a 21st century context.

When it came to creating a brand identity we went full-on retro and we found Mo, our moreTvicar mascot. It is a great 50's pic of a slightly bonkers lady with a cup of tee, a great smile and a killer set of pearls! Once we had found the image the rest followed – wallpaper, colours, font etc etc.

In August 2003 moreTvicar.com was born into cyber world and we quickly gathered some interest – both from punters looking for some great tees and the press who quickly got behind it.

Dylan Jones in the Independent said, “it's tagged as ‘the ultimate online t-shirt store' and having spent rather a lot of time there, I'm inclined to agree”.

The site was featured in Time Out, Telegraph, Express, Nylon, Design Week, Vogue…

We initially launched with about 20 labels plus we commissioned some limited edition T-shirts from a number of London's top creatives including the writer David Toop, the celebrated installation artist Paul Schutze, graphic designer Adam Ellis and T-shirt designer Dale Murray.

A number of labels quickly became press and celebrity favourites including Chunk, retro Disney label Ink & Paint and Soho label Jakes.

To date our T-shirts have been worn by a gaggle of celebs including Steve Jones, David Beckham, Victoria Beckham, Matt Willis, Fearne Cotton, Paris Hilton, Simon Pegg, Sophie Dahl and Sophie Ellis Bextor.

In 2005 we launched a Mother's Day T-shirt campaign in support of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity. We designed the T-shirt, got celebrity support and also managed some sponsorship to enable all of the profits to be donated.

This year the campaign reached new heights and even secured a spot on prime-time terrestrial TV. Sophie Ellis Bextor supported the campaign and it was a MASSIVE success generating in excess of £8000 for the charity.

The site continues to grow and we have remained true to our core values of trying to seek out the very best T-shirt labels from around the world.

We now have in excess of 450 different T-shirts from approximately 50 labels for men, women, babies and kids. Four years on we still sell Jakes and Chunk and have introduced some brand new labels to the market place. Tee Hee, Dephect, Yes No Maybe, Bunk, Anon, Fenchurch, Duffer of St George are all great labels selling great tees.

We continue to work with artists including Abi Williams (founder of cult label Rude), London illustrator Mr Bingo and graphic designer Jon Carnall.

Dale Murray continues to design for the moreTvicar label and is the creative director of Tee Hee.

Co-founders Eileen Peters and Chris Rickwood continue to run the company from a converted carpet warehouse in the heart of gritty, urban, Kentish Town.

And there is lots planned for the future – a members-only tee club offering limited-edition runs and the launch of a year's T-shirt subscription where you sign up for 10 tees and each month you get sent your T-shirt (same idea as a magazine subscription but easier to wear…)

Oh, and the name? It made us smile and we always knew there was more to tea than jam and bread.