Champaign’s Finest

I graduated in May 2017 and spent the summer applying for design jobs. One company wrote back, to say no. What was left was a retail job with nothing to do with design, or spec work on sites where ten designers answer a brief and one gets paid. Both meant designing to someone else’s idea of good. A Complex Blueprint episode on Bobby Hundreds changed how I looked at it. I had been designing shirts for clubs and Greek life since I was a student, so I decided to make my own, for the audience I knew. That fall it cost me nothing, and for once I had something to design.

Most Illinois merch came from the bookstore, a navy or orange tee that says Illinois, and that was the safe option everyone took. The bars, where students spent the other half of the week, had a logo on a shirt at most. The bookstore covered the work half. Nobody was designing for the other half, and that is what I wanted the brand to be.

I was living at my parents’ house, three hours away, so the first pieces went to a few younger friends still on campus, people who were out a lot and would be seen wearing them.

A fraternity or a club would make a shirt for its own event, and you had one if you were in it. As a student I designed a lot of those through Campus Ink, which paid me ten percent, about two dollars a shirt. A good group design sold a hundred times, so one design was worth about two hundred. Owning the line changed the math. A one-sided DTG tee cost about twelve dollars to make and sold for twenty to twenty-two, shipping charged a little over what it cost, and each garment left eight to twelve dollars. Group shirts stopped at the edge of the group. A line sold to everyone did not.

Greek life, the bars and the social calendar kept campus interconnected, and the people who went out spoke the same lingo. Nobody had made it into a line you could just buy.

Group orders came back later, and they showed what the line traded away. A hundred shirts for one event is one big sale with one deadline, and when a print came out wrong or a box arrived short, I paid to fix it before a date that could not move. The line gave that up for one shirt sold many times, and the freedom to design what I wanted.

The first names on the list were Money Block, after the game days students spend at the bars from 11 AM instead of tailgating, and Mass Limited, for a lot of designs each released in small runs. Both were a streetwear brand looking for an audience. What I had was the reverse, an audience I knew, waiting for a brand, and the name had to say where it was from.

I started from how the brands I was looking at were named. Supreme and Champion tell you the person wearing them is the best. Off-White does two things at once: it is a color, and it puts the brand between streetwear and high fashion. Champaign Champion was on the table, but Champion was taken. Then the Kobe shirt from the Life of Pablo tour, with “Lower Merion’s Finest” on the back hem, gave me Champaign’s Finest, which reads as a streetwear name and as top quality at the same time.

Only after choosing it did I remember I had written it once before. In March 2017 I designed an Unofficial shirt with Champaign’s Finest along the back hem, a concept that never got printed, six months before any of this started.

The other reading came later, and from other people. In most cities the finest means the police. It was never the point, but I kept an answer ready. Here the best and brightest were the students, and the tagline said it outright. You are Champaign’s Finest.

Louis Vuitton was the brand I studied closest, from its mark to how its site shows product. Its monogram sets two letters on top of each other until they read as one shape, and that shape reads as a house mark instead of somebody’s initials. I overlapped the C and the F and slanted the pair. An upright CF looked plainer, and it still turned up where a different style fit, like a Giants-style version tried for hats and jerseys.

For the type I went through every typeface on my computer, in the monogram, a one-line wordmark and a stacked lockup, and landed on Hoefler Text small caps. A serif, on purpose. Everything about the mark was reaching for the look of luxury and of money, so people would see value in something new and be willing to pay for it.

For the first two years the profile picture pushed it further. A decorative cut of the mark drawn like the engraving on a dollar bill, fine lines and all. Money is the thing everyone already reads as valuable, and a brand nobody knew yet needed to borrow that value. Once enough of campus knew us, the borrowing could stop, and the profile picture changed to match the site each month. The engraving lived on in the hatched lines through the diamond behind the letters.

The first site leaned on the campus itself, the Quad as the hero and posts of the Union and the bell tower in navy and orange. It made the connection instantly, and as the brand grew, some students took it for the university’s own, a marketing office trying to be cool. I only heard it years later, in the third and fourth year, when the account had moved on to memes and people wrote in to say they had assumed it. We were never associated with the school at all.

Before there were photos of anyone, I mapped designs onto stock models in plain tees, then moved to a mockup kit I still use. Model mockups always looked fake. The real thing was people on campus posting the merch, and saying yes when we asked to repost it.

There were four shoots. Each one was a three-hour drive each way, a couple of hours walking campus to shots I had planned around reflections and shadows, a friend on the camera while I directed, and an evening of editing after. The cost was the drive, a free piece for every model, and the people who canceled at the last minute.

The last shoot was April 2019. When the account turned to memes that fall, they did far better than photos of people in the merch, and the shoots stopped because the account no longer needed them. The site moved to mockups and collages of the merch, with customers’ own posts pulled in from Instagram at the bottom of the page.

A sample ran about $120 from a manufacturer in Shenzhen I found through Alibaba, and we only ever ordered one of each. The sample answers two things a mockup cannot: whether the factory can build what you sent them, and what happens to a design once it stops being a flat file.

On the first baseball jersey I set the lettering big across the chest, and on the line sheet it looked right. On the finished garment it kept going, wrapping around the torso from one side to the other instead of sitting across the front. That is how I learned the safe area on a jersey, how much room embroidery and pinstripes really need before a design starts running off the body.

Once the sample told me what was true, I built a mockup as close to the physical garment as I could get and put it up as a pre-sale, priced under what the item would sell for later. That did three jobs at once. It raised the money to buy the batch, it told me how many to order, and it told me which sizes to order them in.

Some samples never became anything. The interest wasn’t there, and finding that out for $120 is cheaper than finding it out for sixty pieces. The black basketball jersey and the blue and white baseball jerseys shipped. Champaign 11, which puts the campus skyline where Patagonia puts a mountain range, got a sample and stopped. A Fighting Illini concept stayed a concept, drawn for what the teams might wear if the people who live there made them.

Nothing in the feed was a product. It was whatever was happening on campus that day, the weather, a game, an event, posted while it was still happening. Faster than the official accounts could move, and close enough to the day that people checked the page for it. Students in the library found out it was snowing because of the page, not the window.

Selling happened one layer down, in the stories. Polls there asked what people wanted, products were built from the answers, and drops were announced there and nowhere else, so following the page was the only way to know. In the last few months a text-message list went a layer further down again, and got the releases first.

It started with three: one person I knew would be good at it, and two friends who asked. The arrangement never got more formal than it sounds. I send you pieces, you wear them out, you send a photo back, I post it. That is what the industry now calls user-generated content. At the time it was asking people you know for a favor and giving them a shirt.

It grew because photoshoots need bodies. By late 2018 I was putting calls out to followers for models and reps and we were up around six or eight, and that group was built on friendships and history. When the friendships went sideways the team went with them. That was the first time the brand stopped.

The restart was a new group entirely, three people who reached out on their own in early 2020, and they carried the whole Campus Ink run. Afterwards I tried to grow it again, up to about ten, and got the same lesson in a different shape: pieces lost in the mail that I paid to replace, bundles sent out for a rep to share that went to exactly one friend, people who took the merch and sent nothing back at all. I cut it to five or six, then to the three who brought ideas.

Most accounts went with business as usual. Students were asking for the opposite and wrote in to say so. The first case was Covid. People were going out sick, and the account said, plainly, take the masks and the distance seriously so that everyone could keep going out at all. Later it carried what student groups asked it to carry, a march date, a form that reached someone who could act.

Every one of those posts read as politics to someone. The replies were consistent: if you post this you must believe that, I follow this page to have fun, stop pushing propaganda. Then an unfollow, sometimes a block. The cost was legible and immediate, which is what made it a decision rather than a post.

The decision was made as a group. The campus reps felt what the students writing in felt, and the brand said what it believed. Others shared those posts to their own stories, and on those days the account lost fifty to seventy-five followers and gained a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five.

Print on demand left me eight to twelve dollars a garment depending on what it was, and that number set everything else. A tee had to land between fifteen and twenty-two, a long sleeve between twenty-five and thirty, because that is what I would have paid as a student and students were the whole market.

The ceiling turned up as soon as I wanted more from a design. A print on the front and the back is not a DTG job, it is screen printing, and screen printing is priced by placement and by color. Do it and the shirt has to sell for thirty-eight or fifty, which is not a student price. Either the designs stayed simple, or I found a way to be worth the number.

Another Illinois alum, running a swimwear brand, wanted to do a collaboration and I said yes. Then I showed them what the net really came to per piece, and they decided it wasn’t worth doing. That was the right read. They kept building and their brand is still running. I had the same numbers and kept going anyway.

High ticket at low volume was always the other road, and it took until the jerseys in late 2020 to get there. Part of that was the math and part of it was me. Making the same category of thing forever stops working, and a better made object is the honest way to ask for more money.

Nearly everything a campus has in common belongs to somebody. The university’s name and marks, a bar’s name, a beer, a team. Print on demand made the garment cheap and the rights were the expensive part, so the brand spent five years designing around them.

What changed across those years wasn’t the law, it was how findable we were. The bigger the audience, the more a borrowed reference was worth someone’s attention, and I got noticeably more careful the bigger it got.

The tell is in how the biggest players do it. A sports network will post a clip from a sitcom to make a joke about a game, and the sitcom is always one that network owns. The people with the most to lose are the most careful about whose material they borrow. That is the entire calculation, in one habit.