Shirtmandude offers 'fun shirts for weird folks' in Black Mountain
Jay Longshore’s business, Shirtmandude, aims to deliver “fun shirts for weird folks” to Black Mountain and beyond.
The business started in Los Angeles “around 2005” when Longshore was working as a writer at an advertising agency. He said he made concert posters on the side and sold them at shows. Longshore would take whatever posters he had left and sell them on eBay.
He said he started making the T-shirts he is now known for based on one of his posters. Longshore said he discovered shipping T-shirts was easier than shipping posters and decided to focus on the shirt business.
Longshore left his job at the advertising agency and moved across the country to Wilmington with his wife, Maria McLendon. He purchased his own printing equipment and rented what he called a shed in someone’s backyard where he continued to design and print his shirts. Meanwhile, his wife went back to school.
When McLendon graduated, the couple moved to Asheville and Longshore rented a space in Swannanoa to continue his shirt business. Eventually, he made the decision to look for a location the company could own.
"We started thinking that we had to take our own future into our own hands by securing a place that we could own and make shirts," Longshore said.
After looking at a few other locations, Longshore found his current space at 103 Cherry St. in Black Mountain. Here, he continues designing and printing shirts and is now able to have retail space where customers can come in and shop.
“Having this building has been the biggest difference in our lives,” Longshore said. “You get people coming in every day that’s laughing at your work and telling you how fun it is. It’s inspired all of us even more to create more designs because we’re getting that instant feedback and gratification for the work that we’re doing.”
Shirtmandude’s storefront opened in August 2020 as the world was still in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Longshore said he and his team continued to work on the online business at shirtmandude.com that had already been successful while the store was being remodeled.
Longshore said, despite the pandemic, 2020 was one of the most successful years for the business.
“Nobody was on the street so that really kind of made you a little bit nervous about how things were going to go,” Longshore said. “But we still had the online business and everybody during COVID started shopping online, so we started doing almost double our business of what we normally did online.”
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Now, Shirtmandude is taking on a new challenge. Longshore said he and his team are preparing a run of 5,000 shirts to be distributed to Attic Salt, a retailer based in Austin, Texas, that has nearly 70 stores across the country.
Longshore said he finds himself “caught” in a “conundrum” of whether or not to expand the business.
“The future of the business is really just us keeping on doing what we’re doing, creating fun designs with our storefront and our website, taking on custom work from local townspeople,” Longshore said. “Then there’s this whole other question mark dimension of a bigger distribution avenue and whether that’s worth it to us monetarily for the time that it’s going to consume.”
In addition to the Cherry Street storefront, Shirtmandude also continues to sell shirts online. Longshore said he has had orders placed from all over the world.
Longshore said he enjoys owning his own company and he works to create a “real family vibe” for his employees. This includes profit sharing and commission on shirts designed by his employees.
He said his favorite shirt he’s designed involves Bigfoot riding the Loch Ness Monster. Longshore said this was the first shirt he designed that “instantly took off’ and gave inspiration for other shirts like it.
“(It) gave me a little bit of an identity as to what the company was going to be as far as just kind of our general vibe of how we operate and what kind of designs we wanted to put out,” Longshore said. “Something that’s a little bit weird, a little bit off the beaten path.”
Karrigan Monk is the Swannanoa Valley communities reporter for Black Mountain News, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach her at kmonk@blackmountainnews.com.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Shirtmandude offers 'fun shirts for weird folks' in Black Mountain
