Sleevecandy’s ‘accidentally ironic’ thrift-store T-shirts
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The way Reed Hushka sees it, the biggest problem with thrift shops isn’t the lack of cool clothes but the hit-or-miss selection and sizes at individual stores. ‘I live in Chicago,’ Hushka said, ‘but my perfect T-shirt might be sitting in Austin, Texas.’
And so a business was born. Calling them ‘accidentally ironic’ and ‘ridiculously unique,’ Hushka is now exploiting his taste for questionably themed, collector and vintage T-shirts with the online business, Sleevecandy.com, which Hushka founded earlier this year in Evanston, Ill., with three grad-school classmates from Northwestern University. Whether the shirts were made by a corporation or a community group, Sleevecandy sells all the ridiculously awesome T-shirts its shoppers are able to find at Salvation Army stores in Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit, where 30% of each T-shirt’s sale price is donated back to the national charity.
Just half a percent of all the T-shirts sold by the Salvation Army are ridiculous or interesting enough for Sleevecandy, the 28-year-old Hushka said. And not all of them are fit to be resold. To make sure they’re clean and in good condition, the shirts are washed at a Chicago warehouse and inspected for stains and holes before being photographed, tagged with search words and uploaded to the website, where they’re sold for $16 to $52 a pop. The upper end of the price range, Hushka said, are usually of an ‘80s vintage and reference a major force in pop culture, such as Coca-Cola’s switch to a new formula.
The site has about 2,200 T-shirts for sale at any given time. Some go faster than others. An ‘Exxon Mobil Helping Hands’ shirt sold within a few days. A ‘Striving for the Best -- Summer Camp 1996’ ‘has been on the site forever,’ Hushka said.
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-- Susan Carpenter