Two people, one press, and a raccoon with no respect for property law.

Trash Panda Supply Co. started the way most bad ideas start: at a gas station, at 1:40 in the morning, half an hour east of Portland, with nothing to do but wait for a tow truck.

Jon drew a raccoon on the back of a receipt. It had aviators on, for reasons he has never adequately explained. Two weeks later we had twenty four shirts printed at a shop on Sandy Boulevard and handed them out to friends, and within a month four separate strangers had stopped one of those friends on the street to ask where the shirt came from.

That was drop 01. There was no plan for a drop 02.

How we actually make these

Everything is printed by hand on a six-station manual carousel in a 1,400 square foot unit on the east side of Portland. One of us pulls, one of us catches. A good day is 300 shirts and two sore shoulders.

• The blank. 7.1oz ring-spun combed cotton, pre-shrunk, taped shoulders. It costs us roughly double what a standard 5oz blank costs and it is the single thing customers mention most in reviews.
• The ink. Water-based, cured at 320°F. It soaks into the fibre instead of sitting on top of it, so the print goes soft on the first wash and stays that way rather than cracking off in year two.
• The batch. About 240 units per design, split across six sizes. That number is not a marketing device. It is how many shirts two people can pull, cure, fold and ship before the next design is due.

What happens next

Drop 08 is on the press now: roughly 2,600 units across the line, the biggest run we have ever attempted, and the first one where we have paid somebody else to help fold.

There are three new designs in it, two returning colourways and one thing we are not going to describe yet because the screen is still drying. It lands this autumn.

The mailing list gets the link about 48 hours before this site does. That is the only advantage we have to give away, so we give it to the people who asked for it.

The two of us

Jon draws and burns screens. Dana runs the press, the books and most of the decisions that turned out well. Between us we answer every email that comes in, usually within a day, occasionally with ink still on our hands.