Welcome to The Choice100! My name is Matt, and I’m the president of ChoiceShirts. We’re very excited to be announcing the launch of the Choice100. More on that later, first, a little about myself and ChoiceShirts.

ChoiceShirts began in 2001 as an outgrowth from my family’s iron-on transfer company, which has been established in the t-shirt industry for over 30 years. My father was selling iron on transfers to shirt stores and other vendors, stocking one of the largest selections available at about 13,000 unique transfer designs. In 2001, it seemed like a good move to start heat pressing my father’s design inventory onto some t-shirts and selling them online.

Shortly after the tragedy in NYC on September 11th, 2001, Yahoo! listed our shirt store with the following:

“Selection of dog, Christian, automotive, patriotic, and holiday T-shirts and sweatshirts.”

The word “patriotic” in our listing catapulted the demand for shirts into the stratosphere on the second or third day of business. While some folks might consider this opportunistic, we were able to take a part time business and generate a substantial fund to donate to the Red Cross, as well as create a full time job for me. Since then, ChoiceShirts has continued to grow and we pride ourselves in our ability to stay agile as a key to our success.

Over the last several years we have gone through some other transformations of our business model as an effort to stay agile and adjust with demands, industry trends, and customer desires. In 2002 we launched personalized designs where family members could insert names of their kids, pets, or anything onto t-shirts. Shortly after that, we expanded into branded apparel, so we could offer shirts featuring Family Guy, The Simpsons, comic book characters, 80’s prints, classic television logos, and a huge array of other branded shirts.

Monitoring the success of both of those efforts, customer interest led us to build a “create your own” application that led us to an entirely new and exciting part of the industry, doing digital printing. Over a year of research and development went into developing ChoiceStudio, an application where anyone can design just about anything to put on a shirt. Best of all, digital printing gave us the ability to print full color designs on a variety of shirts without minimum order sizes or screen charges. We recently began offering our customers the ability to print on any color garment, including darks with amazing results.

The ChoiceStudio application, and a large investment in ‘direct-to-garment’ printing equipment opened up a world of new opportunities for our business. Today, we are one of the industry leaders in direct-to-garment printing. We not only print designs created by our customers but we have an entire line of shirts that have been designed by an in-house creative staff.

Our digital printing operation is the fastest growing and most exciting area of our company and has led us to the creation of the Choice 100.