October is a t shirt printing, screen printing, garment sourcing and embroidery supplier established in 1990. We source a wide range of clothing and accessories to fit the most demanding of specifications. Although we print and embroider for a variety of sectors, our speciality is fashion.
With this in mind we offer a full service including garment sourcing, graphic design input, range development, technical screen print and embroidery advice, label supply, re-labelling, bagging, swing ticketing and bulk distribution.
This isn't everything. That would just be too massive, but it is a cross section of all our favourite T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoods, polos, hats etc. It's what a pretentious bell end might call a curated edit. Feel free to call us with any questions, and let us know if we left anything out.
It all started 25 years ago. Paul finished a degree in obscure eastern religions, and was surprised to find he couldn't get a job. Not a problem, a friend had a sewing machine,
October is a t shirt printing, screen printing, garment sourcing and embroidery supplier established in 1990. We source a wide range of clothing and accessories to fit the most demanding of specifications. Although we print and embroider for a variety of sectors, our speciality is fashion.
It’s been a recent pleasure to screen print for Fightscrubs, whose aim is to ‘Make a quality fashion based range of t-shirts, which are thought provoking, edgy and a little more twisted than most other fighty sort of brands out there…’
Their prints are ‘done on high quality t-shirts and are printed to the highest standard, (their words not ours, so thanks!) so they aren’t going to give up after a few rounds in the washing machine, to give a unique looking high quality shirt from an up and coming brand, at a fair price’
Fightscrubs is still a company in it’s infancy, but feedback from their first line of products and levels of repeat custom have been very good, they have even managed to get one of their tees on music and fashion icon Maxim from “The Prodigy” as pictured here…A proud moment!
I was about to move on to start and discuss the main business of looking for that perfect T shirt, but I can’t help myself, and the mention of Harry Harris from Berwick Street has simply forced me to remember another industry legend, Dr Albert Hackett.
The good Doctor came to work for us on a year’s sabbatical from the University of Michigan, where he was founder of the university’s Rheology Department, and Senior Lecturer in Molecule Vibration. He arrived in the UK to further his studies on mesh tensions, and refine his patented screen wipes.
It wasn’t long before he was a major contributor in the leading industry magazine, where in his opening address he commented…
“I’m happiest alone in a laboratory, throbbing test tube in hand, but while I’m in Great Britain I’m more than willing to help out with any technical questions screen printers may have, particularly on the subject of yellow mesh, low frequency light diffusion.”
Over the months he touched on many key technical issues, and was taken very seriously by both editors and readers alike…on one occasion he travelled back to Philadelphia to meet rapper Whoop Doggy Puffhouse, to see how he dealt with the dazzle from his massive bling, and whether that could help screen printers in England suffering from problems with their vision, due to applying too much foil onto T-shirts. He developed a patented device for shaving the garment fluff off T-shirt printing equipment, the Dr Albert Hackett Fuzz Platt, £19.99 in all good stores. And he investigated the problem of shrinkage after spilling a mug of cocoa on his sports jacket….in his own words….
‘In relaxation shrinkage during manufacturing, textiles can stretch, and are sometimes shaped and dried under tension. Macroscopic stresses occur, particularly when fibres swell in a liquid medium or when heat is applied during drying, but they can be easily released, by simply adding three teaspoons of Diddly Mixture’
He developed a huge following over the months, became the screen printer’s friend and was asked to open a local supermarket, so you can imagine how disappointed everyone was when his column was axed, after his article on ‘How to tie your tie without getting your hand stuck,’ alerted the editors to the fact that he was a complete and utter fictitious wind up, and actually a character based on one of the lads from October Textiles Ltd…reminding us before we get on with the serious stuff, let’s make it fun…
Have you endured that negativity? I hope so because it’s not meant to be…it’s just me morally absolving myself before we begin in earnest, making sure you really want to take the magical journey, before we pack the Elvish bread, the Mithril coat and the packet of Benson’s, before we crack on.
So you’re with me, and we’re doing this thing, and I guess your next thought is….HELP! Where do I go, what do I say, who do I call, Ghostbusters?
There’s Google, there are T-shirt forums, or you can ask Jeeves if he’s not making a restorative cocktail, but what is required I feel to get stuff properly happening, are some proper people, and these are now thinner on the ground.
Forgive me again if I look backwards in a way that may be totally useless to you, but humour me a moment while we remember Harry Harris from Berwick Street.
When I had a dream and stumbled into this game, he found my number from somewhere, and would call me every week without fail…and it went something like this…
Paul, is that you boy…?
‘Hello Harry, are you well?’
‘I am son, fit as a Butcher’s, but not as well as you’re going to be when you hear about what I’ve got for you…’
‘Really Harry, what’s that?’
(Silence, as Harry looks furtively about, making sure no one can hear, and while he builds the required level of tension to deliver his news),
‘Harry, are you still there?’
‘I’m not even going to tell anyone else about this one Paul, not a peep not a whiff not a whisper’
‘Tell them what Harry?’
‘You’re the face for this one Paul, you’re the man, the head honcho, il Capitano, numero bloody uno…my son, you know what’s gone and happened don’t you’
‘No Harry, I’m not sure I do’
‘My boy, your ship has only finally gone and come in!’
‘If it ever does Harry, I’ll be at the airport.’
‘Not this time amigo, you’re at the port in a brand new titfer, waiting to jump on board’
‘Harry! What have you got?’
‘What have I got, what have I bloody got? I’ll tell you what I’ve got son (more silence as he makes sure the coast is clear)….I’ve only got 10, 000 metres, of it’
‘Of what?’
‘Crepe de bloody chine my son, crepe de bloody chine!’
‘So you’ve got some fabric for me?’
‘Fabric he says, fabric! It’s the cloak of the gods this stuff son, fit for a queen!’
‘What colour is it Harry?’
‘It’s that really fashionable one, that sells really well’
‘Which is?’
‘Well, it’s a sort of Chinese floral, covered in lucky monkeys…my Mrs has had some put up in our gaff, only two days before she had a very nice tickle at Sandown races, and I’ll tell you what else…’
‘Harry, STOP! What do I want with floral fabric, I’m a printer, I need plain fabrics!’
‘Exactly my son, and that’s why I’ve called you and no one else…(silence while Harry wonders how he’s going to get out of this one)…you’re a printer, so you can print in plain, and then put your own pattern on! How much do you want?’
I never bought a single thing from Harry, not a thread. But he called me every week all the same for twenty years, and gave me a million pounds worth of business advice…and obviously tried to sell me 5000 pairs of crushed velvet hot pants ‘like the ones Pan’s People used to wear,’ a consignment of fire damaged woks, and 20, 000 bread boards that I’d have no problem shifting, because they’d been ‘made by that bloke who was the surfer in the Old Spice advert’
One day, it was a Tuesday, and he called me no more…and I was sad. I tell myself he had made his dough, and retired to a nice little bungalow by the sea with ‘My Vera’…I miss him. I miss them all, Blue Peter, Sunglasses Henry, and Textile Tony, who showed me the Manchester Fold, which makes you look like you’ve got more fabric than you really have. Which reminds me of the time Tony went to pick up a greyhound for Suglasses Henry, and lost it at South Mimms Service Station, went off like a whippet, as it would, but hold on, I’m going off too…the point is, we need some good people.
You’ve found out who you are, you know who you want to sell to, you know how you’re going to reach them…but before you get all product obsessed and and start trying to re invent a sweatshirt (whatever you’re thinking, it’s been done)…turn off the computer, get on the blower, talk to some real people…and then follow your heart…don’t ask yourself ‘Is their client list impressive’…ask yourself, ‘Would I have a beer with him, and if it kicked off, would he have my back’…make a friend, share a story…find a Harry.
We don’t add new products for the sake of it, we have to wait until we find nice ones that we like and would actually want to wear….never easy, but the waiting is over for a while, thanks to the new Stanley & Stella collection from our friends in Belgium.
The range takes its name from the 50’s classic movie ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ in which Marlon Brando, playing the character Stanley, wore his T-shirts as they’d never been worn before….
These images lifted the humble T from an unseen garment to be worn with massive underpants, to the iconic fashion statement it is today.
As for Stella, she didn’t wear any T-shirts, but she had plenty of presence, as might you in the rather lovely girls range…
Unlike the 50’s, these garments have planet saving values, and are all organic, sustainable and politically correct.
We have chosen a handful of recommended tasters in our Stanley & Stella section, but for the full range please follow these links…
Obviously since I wrote that I’ve thought of two more reasons for failure…I know, this game’s tougher to take than a concrete love sausage, so let’s get some of the hard stuff out of the way.
Big question number one… before you pull on the crushed velvet purple beret, fire up Photoshop and start your label…why?
Because you love design? Because you can’t see anything nice in the shops? Do you find your job dull and boring? Do you have some spare loot you would rather spend creatively rather than on a bar stool in the Badger’s Balls? Do you know someone famous who has promised to give you an easy leg up? Do you hope that the doors of fashion will swing open, revealing a Narnia of excitement and red carpeted celebrity…will I be famous, original, and respected? These are all reasons, fair and fine, but are they enough?
We all love design in this caper, never happier than when we’re loafing in spandex; none of us can find what we want in the shops, think our boss is a total length and want to be creative…some of us even have a mate who once played a sheep dog’s diddler in Emmerdale….it ain’t enough.
A famous actor once said, it isn’t enough to ‘want’ to act, you will only succeed if you ‘have’ to act…true dat Richard Briers, and rest in peace. If the ‘having’ to start a label resonates with you, then proceed to issue number two — do you have something to say?
At the risk of sounding like an affected whoopsie, good graphic design is supposed to be ‘intellect made visible’ — is there something deep and twisted inside that you want to get out? Are you disturbed by the X Factored death of modern art, culture, expression and entertainment…do you have a political message, a social story, a passion to manufacture in England? What do you really give a proper monkey’s chuff about?
If there is something, can you condense it into maybe five criteria that all of the new collection of graphics will adhere to? Will each design have for example a sense of heritage, an emotional statement, a point of contradiction, a splash of humour, a desire to shock, a message from the streets and so on?
Get all that down, reach inside, pull your heart out and make it into an image, and we can add to that, with print techniques, garment and label selections that will ice the cake and hammer home the point…it will create all the back story we then need for marketing, web sites, and answering the uninventive journalist’s question, ‘What is the philosophy behind the brand’? You will have an identity that the customer can read and understand. Fail, and what have you got? A bunch of pictures…there are primary school walls that have that…although that could be an inspiration right there!
So you HAVE to do it, you have distilled your pictorial message into a pure alcohol of who you really are, now what?
Question three — who gives a shit?
A great message is nothing without an audience — you’ll be playing Hendrix note perfect in your back bedroom to a hamster. Who are they, where are they, and most importantly, can I afford to reach them? And don’t say 18-30 year old professionals with disposal dollar…that could mean a failed hairdresser in Rotherham….any more than mentioning your desire to reach Vogue readers, unless you’ve got a twenty grand a month advertising budget and a ski lodge in Aspen.
So who got the who, where, and affordable to reach trinity right? Let me give you a Fr’instance — One True Saxon. Essentially a lad brand, meaning heritage, Englishness, humour, a sense of northern place, and well engineered kit. This reflected in everything right down to the product names, the Rufford jumper, the Clifton underpants, all places local to Nottingham…so where might their customers be? Well we know there are 40,000 of them in that football stadium over there, and hello, that’s handy, it’s really cheap to advertise in football fanzines.
We know who we are, we know where they are, and we can afford to tell them…3-0, we win.
I said four things didn’t I, yes I think so, and four is a biggie:
Time.
Unless you’re prepared to see this through until you’ve got saggy bazookas or a wizened ball bag, don’t bother. Whatever budget you have will be better spent on that car you’ve always fancied or two weeks somewhere hot and spicy.
When we first started it went like this.
We lied profusely to get into a really stylish street wear trade show back in the day, called 40 degrees. It was impossible to get a pitch unless your name was Torquil, or you were cooler than a Penguin’s fridge.
We supplied visuals that were a total work of fiction, never returned their calls to make us look like we couldn’t care less, and when the organizers eventually came to see us, had a mate across the road ramming two pence pieces into a phone box to make our office look busy (yes, it was that long ago).
When we were accepted into the hallowed fold, we turned up, built a stand, and filled our pants that the show officials would see that we only had three T shirts and a bobble hat.
They didn’t, so you sit there, and wait for the retailers.
In the Spring, they will walk past, look down their nose and say ‘Another bloody T-shirt brand’
So you drive home in tears, smoke 200 Chesterfields and dust yourself down until the Autumn, when they’ll say ‘Those bell ends are still here.’
The following Spring they might say, ‘Fair play, they’re a persistent bunch of mugs’…and then the moment comes…Autumn, a few seasons in…John from that massive retailer who shall remain nameless is lost. It’s 3 o’clock, and he’s just been sniffing like an ant eater in the lavvy, trying to get straight for some nonsense after show party, and he falls onto your stand to start leafing through the rails. Richard from somewhere equally big stumbles by and thinks….’Mmmm, those T-shirt guys are still here, and John’s having a butchers…he knows what he’s on with, I’d better check them out.’
And so on, and then suddenly, whoosh, gold strike at Bear Creek, the word is out, and all the sheep are flocking in like there’s a wolf on the rampage — you’ve made it, they want you, they have to have you….but it takes a little time….
‘We pride ourselves on hand printing our t-shirts in the United Kingdom, so we wanted to tell you all about it.
We hire professionals to print our t-shirts and it shows on every one of our flawless designs. In order to maintain the quality of the print wear after wear, we decided to use a mix of water based and plastisol ink, which means its soft, but durable.
October are happy to screen print for Sunspel again, as they bring a little subtle English charm to the streets of New York.
Opening Saturday 1st June 2013 in Manhattan, New York City, they have teamed up with C’H’C’M to take up a portion of their Bond Street store
Alongside a carefully chosen selection of their own luxury basics — like the iconic Riviera Polo, new swim shorts, classic Egyptian cotton t-shirts and their luxurious Sea Island Cotton collection – will be an assortment of the finest handcrafted products Britain has to offer: hats from Lock & Co, Liberty-print cotton Boxer Shorts, bench-made leather shoes from Joseph Cheaney & Sons of Northamptonshire and luxurious Cashmere knits from Johnston’s of Elgin.
To celebrate their first foray on the other side of the ‘pond’, they’ve also collaborated with designers House Industries and artists Jon Contino and Jen Mussari to create 7 exclusive designs.
Well I will say yes, why not, because I had one, at least I did once, a very long time ago, post punk and yet before the summer of love, when glow stick in hand and with a whistle around their neck, everyone needed a lunatic shirt to lose, in some happy and now half forgotten field. And I made them, stupid things they were with whopping stabber collars, billowing sleeves and 12 inch cuffs, out of Saree fabrics and African head dress material…I looked like Willy Wonker, give or take a letter. I blame the marvellous Wayne Hemingway, founder of Red or Dead and purveyor of the flamenco sleeved lunacy that I loved. And I had some success, my moment in the sun; but I’ll still say yes with caution, and here’s where I morally absolve myself and end up sounding like your Dad…if you want an easier business, start a chocolate teapot factory, market a plastic pan for salads, invent a revolving soup fork, because it doesn’t get much harder than starting a fashion brand.
I get between ten and twenty enquiries a day, from footballers, actors, bus drivers and teachers, hookers, shepherds and bee keepers, saying ‘I don’t suppose anyone has said this to you before, but I’m thinking of starting my own clothing brand’…and I’ve been doing that for over twenty years. To view the success rate would require an electron microscope, and by success I don’t mean getting your T-shirt onto the winner from ‘I’m A Celebrity Tosspot’ – I mean getting to the point where you’re so desirable, that someone would give you proper loot to buy your brand.
So what are the two main reasons for failure, and how do I avoid them?
I’ll tell you next time….I bloody hate it when people do that….
….but I’ll make it as brief as I can, this is supposed to be a diary after all so we need to get up to speed, up to the present day, but a little back story shouldn’t hurt, while avoiding being one of those blokes at the end of the bar talking about when you could buy your own body weight in sweets and still have change from a groat, back when there were long summers, and the streets were full of white dog shit.
It didn’t begin with me, it began first with Nottingham, and perhaps with Great Aunt Daisy…there’s no room to tell you all about her days in the children’s home, the long nights in the ‘haunted cellar’ as punishment for some nothing misdemeanour, and her revenge, by slapping the evil Matron in the face with the boiling gristle stew. Another time perhaps, should you ever want to know, because she escaped eventually, and like so many local girls from what was then a proper steaming slum, found work in Nottingham’s Lace Market. (more…)
Of course I’d like to start it with a whiff of glamour, something like ‘As I begin our diary, I find myself looking out across the Indian Ocean’….or ‘It is the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and twenty two, rum rations are low and there are mutinous stirrings among the scurvy crew’…but of course the reality is I’ve just driven to work. Across Trent Bridge though on a sunny day, past the City Ground, where if the light from the water is in your eyes you might still imagine, that you’ve seen the green sweatshirt of Brian Clough through that little gap between the stands, where you can just about see the pitch…and on down London Road beside the canal, to the the October Textiles Factory, at the foot of Malin Hill, where a cobbled street will still help you climb into the heart of a now quieter Lace Market….bloody hell…the phone’s ringing, and this diary will be a bit like that, we’ve got to keep the last vestiges of UK manufacturing alive, but I am decided at least where this diary will begin…with a story of how it began…
A great pleasure as ever to screen print for Ellen and Jennifer at Extragged on their project for the band Youth Club, who are no doubt massively cool, and on my list to check out when I can stop listening to Tom Waits…and beyond that, two things to say:
1) A personal thank you for reminding me why we all got into this game…for fun…and…
2) A large well done for getting one of the most important bits spot on — the photography.
If web sites are all about stuffing a two dimensional thing with as much personality as possible, then www.extragged.com has in my view, nailed it. Real people looking like they’re entirely up for it, beautifaully shot, having a good time…how I like to think I’d do it, if I thought for one minute I wouldn’t look a total knob…so I’ll stick to my armchair, but I still know bloody brilliant when I see it!
‘How much should I sell my T-s for’…. it’s a big question, and one we’re signed up for secrecy for with many brands…I guess we have to comment on this one though, not that we’re suggesting you push the boat out quite this far, but it tells some kind of story when French fashion house Balmain can sell a ripped cotton tee shirt for more than 1,000 Euros…quick, where are the bloody scissors!
