Bantam Apparel is the parent company of a set of topical websites that sell t-shirts.

Although branded separately, the individual sites themselves Ice Cold T-Shirts, Echelon Shift, and Ajanta.org operate through a centrally management system that distributes and to some extent markets sales gathered by each unique store. Its logos have been featured in numerous popular magazines, including Rolling Stone and Cracked Magazine.

History

Officially launched in spring of 2004, Bantam Apparel was originally branded solely within Ice Cold T-Shirts. It enjoyed mild success and was featured in a number of popular magazines including Rolling Stone and the San Francisco Weekly. One of its more popular designs was "We can't stop here, this is bat country" which was released shortly after the death of author Hunter S Thompson. Although creating a small following, Ice Cold T-Shirts did not reach mainstream success due to the sudden influx of other online t-shirt stores including Busted Tees and Threadless. Additionally, problems with new algorithm changes taking place in Google and the introduction of the sandbox effect made it very difficult for businesses launched after 2004 to compete with larger more established websites.

Development

In around the summer of 2005 the decision was made to separate Ice Cold T-Shirts into individually branded websites. Although the details of the individual sites themselves were not fully realized until later, the development of a more evolved and efficient product delivery system was initiated. The primary focus of these developments was to take into account what restrictions existed in the current infrastructure that could prevent expansion in the future using current business practice as reference.

The development period of this infrastructure was undefined but eventually reached finalization approximately a year later in the end of the summer of 2006. Officially launched on August 15th, 2006, Bantam Apparel was fully functional along with three stores.

Stores

Ice Cold T-Shirts was re-branded with a new look and logo and focussed on the entertainment portion of the original website. This included the categories popculture, clubbing and movies and television.

Echelon Shift took over the political, revolutionary and religious aspect of Ice Cold T-Shirts and was launched with various Libertarian and controversial logos. In addition to the logos themselves, Echelon Shift provided informational links and articles that introduced supporting evidence or thought provoking ideas related to the logo.

Ajanta.org was launched with a focus on the spiritual aspect of the original Ice Cold T-Shirts, with strong ties to Hinduism, Buddhism and other new age concepts. Similar to Echelon Shift, Ajanta.org provided informative articles relating to the particular logos. Due to the nature of the original site, Ajanta.org was released with very few logos as compared to the other two stores. However, this did tie in with the store as it was branded as a boutique shop more than an online t-shirt shop.

Controversy

Many logos distributed by Bantam Apparel and its stores have received criticism by visitors in the form of hatemail. Political shirts such as the "Bush Nazi" ("Bush" with the "s" replaced with a swastika) shirt, the "I had an abortion" shirt, and the "Unions Suck - If you don't like your job, go get an education" shirt have sometimes been the target of criticism.

Efforts to market the stores have sometimes been difficult with some of the content being marked as inappropriate to minors and generally offensive. On occasion, attempts to contract printing jobs have met with problems as some screen printing firms have been unwilling to print the content they deemed inappropriate.

Store links

• Ice Cold T-Shirts
• Echelon Shift
• Ajanta.org