The souvenir industry made a decision at some point, quietly and without a vote, that certain places were worth commemorating and the rest were worth driving through. Waterfalls got shirts. Mountains got shirts. A town of eleven thousand with a hockey rink, a contested opinion about pizza, and a hundred years of people being born in it got a gas station.
We disagree with the second half of that decision. Not indignantly — indignation is exhausting and nobody asked. We disagree the way you disagree with a bad filing system: by quietly building a better one and putting everything in it.
The rule we do not break
Never mean toward the places. The humour is entirely in the sincerity. A commemorative garment for a town of 11,942, produced with total seriousness, is funnier and truer than any joke about the town could be. If a design would make a local wince, it does not get printed. If it would make a local nod slowly, it ships.
This is not a rule about taste. It is a rule about who we are making these for. The answer is: the people from there, and the people who are about to admit they are from there.
Why everything looks thirty years old
Because a souvenir that looks new is a product, and a souvenir that looks found is a memory. Heavyweight garment-dyed blanks that were faded in the dye tank rather than in Photoshop. Prints that sit a hair off-register. A palette that was brighter once and has since calmed down. If it looks designed this year, it is wrong and we start again.
How a town gets in
Somebody asks. That is the entire mechanism. Every region is open, but no catalogue of 2,150 shirts covers every town in North America — so the gaps get filled in the order people name them. Nominate your hometown and it goes into the next batch. The catalogue is written by homesick people, which we consider the correct authorship.
- 1978The year we are pretending it is
Every design passes one test: would a sincere gift shop in this town have done it this way, with the type it had, in the colours it could get.
- 2026Founded, actually
Two people, a heavyweight blank, and a list of towns nobody had printed a shirt for. The list was longer than expected. It is still growing.
- NowSixty-three regions
Two thousand one hundred and fifty souvenirs across every province, territory and state. Not one of the towns is famous. That was the entire specification.
Every shirt ships with a Certificate of Mediocre Authenticity, which makes no claims about the town’s significance and is signed anyway. It is the most honest document in retail.
you were somewhere.