Designing t-shirts has always been fun for me. I have over 20 years of experience as a UX designer, but I've also worked on shirt designs for several different companies. I even took a screen print class several years ago to understand the process better. This project is my first time doing anything like this for myself, so it was a fun experience.


With so many different sports-oriented clothing companies, we wanted to start small. We used a local screen printer in San Diego, AKA, and they were great to work with. We currently have six designs and a hat. There are a lot of other ideas floating around, and hopefully, those will get printed at some point.

The initial idea was that the designs would not be specific to a team or sport. We wanted fans to be able to wear the shirt to any stadium or field, regardless of what it was. The shirt would fit in at baseball, lacrosse, arena football, or a Saturday morning soccer game at the park. There are a lot of different fans and a lot of different sports.

Well, I messed up that whole idea with our Beautiful Game shirt. I grew up playing the game, and I still love a kickaround. I had an idea for a simple type treatment and an endline/touchline design, and we just rolled with it. Soccer (yes, I called it soccer) will always hold a special place in my heart, so it was okay to have this one design. Plus, we recently added the MLS to the site.

The other designs are all clean and straightforward. We kept everything on gray and black shirts for the first drop to keep it neutral. A few professional teams have black and gray, but we weren't too worried about that.

In the Stands is a real labor of love for me, and is also a special DIY project. I decided I would do the product shots myself. I set up my little light kit in the garage and had a little photo shoot. It's not very fancy, but it got the job done.

Since I did the whole inthestands.co site by myself, I figured why not try some ecommerce. I decided to start off pretty simple and just use one of the default Shopify themes. It's a pretty easy WYSIWYG editor and so far has worked fine. Down the road I might try to incorporate the Shopify workflow in the Webflow site, but that is down the road.

I've always known this, but selling stuff online is hard. Getting people to the site doesn't always equate to sales. That is one thing I'm working on. Another thing I need to be better at is social. Trying to make In the Stands more available to the right type of people that might appreciate the brand.