378 days of purposely sourced upper torso wear forms a tower approximately 3 metres high should you be so inclined as to build one, and fills 8 standard issue black bin bags should you choose to transport them from your old flat to your new house.
They also gain you a lot of attention on the Internet if you acquire them from strangers all over the globe, wear them back-to-back for an entire year (and 13 days) and blog about each and every one in turn.
My THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE T-shirt challenge has now officially come to a close. I successfully met my target, and excelled it. I am once again free to wear whatever I please.
That's a little daunting actually; the realisation that I no longer need to carefully consider a week's worth of outfits at a time to ensure I don't end up wearing something grossly inappropriate to a dinner function or a small baby's Christening. The removed need to fill my morning commute with furiously typed anecdotes and reviews. The dissolved requirement to snap a photo of myself that's become a hard-coded daily ritual. Stepping out of the challenge is definitely going to be an adjustment this year.
Despite the frivolous intentions I had of the project when I dreamt it up back in November 2012, the daily reality was actually quite formidable. Convincing major brands and cash-strapped independent retailers to surrender their stock to me for free was no trivial feat. Neither was finding the time each and every day to write a solid blog post and maintain the webpage. I had to put in hours upon hours of dedicated promotion and research and grovelling to prevent me from failing the challenge. It certainly taught me a lot about willpower, and even more about the power of marketing.
Fortunately, aside from a desperately manic dry spell around the end of September, I managed to encourage a steady flow of donations all year long, keeping myself clothed and amassing an impressive bundle of tees to donate on to charity (stay tuned for details on that).
Of course, the challenge wasn't just a marketing exercise; that was merely the vehicle to drive it. The core of the project was and always has been to see if it were possible for one guy to wear a different T-shirt every day for an entire year?
The answer, I'm pleased to have discovered, is yes, it is. And it makes for quite an adventure along the way:
T-shirt donations from complete strangers began arriving a month before the challenge even started and at least one of those deliveries came all the way from America! As the challenge progressed I started receiving T-shirts from the farthest corners of the Earth - one especially unique design came to me from Malaysia (Day 32) which I thought was pretty rad.
To reciprocate, I took the challenge on tour to a couple of destinations around the globe. I traveled to Vegas for CES 2013 in January to round off a design project for Samsung I was working on (Days 7-11), and in May, I jetted off to Lithuania to attend a ceremony converting my girlfriend into my wife, where I had to tread the precarious line between failing my challenge in a suit and living happily ever after (Day 145). Deciding what to wear for my wedding when confined to nothing but T-shirts was matched only by my having to decide what to wear for Halloween that year(Day 306).
As expected, friends and family took the opportunity to donate T-shirts to the project with the soul intent of making me look utterly foolish (Day 304 and Day 125), but less predictably, so did a couple of vendors (Day 23 and Day 30). A couple of members of the general public threw in a tee or two from their own wardrobes (Day 340 and Day 177) and a couple of companies who have nothing to do with the T-shirt industry at all hastily pulled some promotional garments together once they'd heard about what I was doing (Day 161 and Day 17).
Once the challenge gained traction and word spread, I found myself involved in all sorts of awesome T-shirt situations. For example, on Day 255 I was assured that the T-shirt I was donated would endow me with superpowers and that the donator would eventually reward me with treasure (which reminds me, I need to follow her up on that). One brand had me wear a tee of theirs before it was available to purchase in their store (Day 305). Another set up an online discount code exclusively for the readers of my blog (Day 350). A couple of donators went as far as to design T-shirts for me (Day 90 and Day 2) and one was more than happy to print up a tee featuring one of my own designs (Day 257). Heck, I even won a T-shirt on Day 292!
Wearing three hundred and sixty five different T-shirts in a year wasn't completely without incident of course. There was the day I had to organise the logistics of getting an entire shipment of T-shirts across the ocean from a retailer who did not ship internationally (Posted on 3/4/2013), there was the day I had to tussle with customs agents to negotiate the surrender of a T-shirt package (Posted on 4/9/2013), and there was the day I had to leave the house with no T-shirt on at all, hoping to intercept one I'd organised be in transit as I travelled to my office or else fail my challenge immediately (Day 80).
Not forgetting having to deal with the numerous T-shirts I was sent that really had no business being seen by anyone (Days 236, 237, 187 and 371) - they were particularly difficult to wear all day!
Overall, my THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE T-shirt challenge has been an amazing success and really given what was an already jam-packed year a motivational injection. It's helped me to form new relationships, engage with new audiences and make another entertaining dent in the quirky Internet landscape. My little T-shirt project.
I'd like to once again thank everyone who took part in or expressed an interest in my THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE challenge, as were it not for you I'd have just been another downloadable topless disappointment.
Now that the project is complete and forever in my memory as 'that thing I did that time', I can say without equivocation that I've been there, done that, and most definitely got the T-shirt.
Thanks for reading.
