Tshirts By E2 is the brainchild of a talented American designer (Elizabeth) and a British-Greek man, full of ideas (Elias). Elias and Elizabeth had been long distance friends for years by the time E2 began. It started in February 2010, as a running inside “joke” between them. Elizabeth’s previous online experience and Elias’s ideas started what they thought would be a crazy, fun venture and an outlet for their creativity. One year later the “joke” has blossomed into a growing business and it’s turned out to not be such a crazy idea after all. It does however continue to be fun.
We originally thought that we would create a shop ( http://www.tshirtsbye2.com ) mostly for us. A shop where we could design t-shirts that we liked, and we would like wearing. T-shirts and other basic cotton apparel are staples in our wardrobe and we love wearing our designs – on the street, in the house and even as pyjamas. We, therefore, created the shop to channel our own internal creativity, in a form that we could both wear. We never thought about sales numbers. We didn’t create the shop to become millionaires. We had planned, that if people liked some of our designs, we would at least recover our online costs.
A few months after opening, we realised that our creativity was overflowing. We found inspiration everywhere, and we had actually found a fantastic way to express ourselves. Within the first 6 months we already had 300 t-shirt designs and to our surprise, sales were steadily increasing each month. Our biggest sellers are Scrubs and The Big Bang Theory inspired creations. Both are hilarious TV series, which are hugely popular around the world. We also designed t-shirts for car enthusiasts, t-shirts that can project personality traits, as well as political, environmental and religious beliefs. We may have been naughty as well...
The success we had during the holiday season caught us by surprise. Unexpectedly in December, we got a wonderful opportunity, as one of our Scrubs t-shirts “Knife-Wrench” was featured on the ABCTV blog on CafePress. Within an hour of the story being posted our sales skyrocketed and the trend continued for the rest of the month, We were shocked to realise that so many people, all around the world, would be getting a present that we had created. Therefore, we wish to say a huge thank you to all our customers that have provided us with extra motivation to keep designing. However, we never create a design we wouldn’t like to wear ourselves.
So, after a very prolific year, we have 500 t-shirt designs in our shop and counting. As you can imagine at this point, February 2011, the idea of our shop as a “joke” has become obsolete. We continue having enormous fun coming up with new ideas but we have also created a professional online shop where fun designs co-exist with serious political and environmental concerns, sprinkled with hints of irony and sarcasm. We hope that our creativity will keep flowing at the same pace and we hope that people all over the world will continue enjoying our t-shirts.
