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I’ve been wanting to publish this post for several weeks, but I had to maintain secrecy. It’s been really challenging trying to figure out exactly what our new Kids Quest t shirts were going to look like. I’ve gone through several initial designs but since this shirt was a gift for our volunteers, I didn’t want to post it online for feedback where a lot of my volunteers would see it (since a lot of them lurk around this site. Ha!). So, here’s what we’ve got.

About 15 months ago I launched this new shirt for our volunteers. It had been YEARS (I think) since there had been a children’s ministry shirt and the most recent one was a very, bright (as in neon bright) green. I’ll just tell you, I don’t do neon. So, the new shirts were a welcome change. The volunteers loved them. My goal was to make the design a little on the edgy side. I didn’t want your typical children’s ministry volunteer shirt.

Then back in August I launched this shirt. Although I really like this shirt, I only ordered a small number of them for staff, some key leaders and as a shirt kids could buy when they registered for our lock-in. I’m getting ready to make them available online and let volunteers and parents order them. The colors are more fun and bright (closer to what you’d expect for kidmin, but the design is still pretty cool.

Then this last weekend we held a volunteer appreciation party where we gave out our newest volunteer only shirt. The quest actually started 4-5 weeks ago, but even so, I didn’t have enough time to see my grand vision to come life. That will be our next shirt. I can’t wait. I’ll tell you more about what that one is going to look like, but you’re going to have to wait. So, this shirt was a compromise, not exactly what I originally hoped, but something I’m still very happy with. I wanted a design that would be popular with the men but still something the girls would like. The feedback so far has been fantastic. The volunteers love them! I’ve been in kidmin for years and I’ve had many cheesy shirts designed. I still have a lot in my closet (more than my wife is happy about). I’m at the point now that I only want to design shirts that our teenage or adult male volunteers (especially the ones that are somewhat fashion aware) would get excited about. So, I feel like we got pretty close to that with this shirt.

With this shirt in particular, I wanted an off-center design. It’s still hard to find screen printers that will print “over-sized” and print over collars and seams (which is what we originally wanted). Due to time limitations, we ended up having to stick with our local screen printer that could print the standard size and not go over seams. I was at the Texas State History Museum for by birthday and saw a similar shirt with an off-center design on the back, which I had never seen before. I loved it, so decided to do it for this shirt.

We printed 400 of these shirts, 3 colors on the front, 3 on the back. We had two different setup charges as we had this image for the larger adult sizes and this image for the small adult sizes. Our final cost was about $4.40 per shirt. Not bad, huh?

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