Wearable news

You may wear your heart on your sleeve, but now you can also wear the latest news on your back. T-post, a Swedish company, delivers news to subscribers around the world, albeit in a different way.  

• 

  T-post February 2011: “Under Surveillance" News: “Thanks to technology, many of us now live our lives in public. Anyone who wants to know knows when you’re home or at work and when you are not.” Design: David S. Blanco from England.

• When Peter Lundgren, originally from Umeå in the north of Sweden, ran an ad agency in Stockholm a few years back, he had an idea.
  “I though why not print newspaper articles on t-shirts! Reading the newspaper is usually something we do in private. Although we all like to discuss news, it gets so much more interesting when you talk to others about it.”
  The idea became an experiment in the office, a bit of a hobby, something Lundgren and his colleagues engaged in when work was slow.
  “We began selling these t-shirts to friends and friends of friends. But I always had the notion that it would work on a larger level.”
  The shirts had even more potential than that. In 2004 Lundgren left the ad agency and moved back to Umeå to focus solely on T-post, which he named the business, and some 300 subscribers. Today he has 2,500 subscribers and they are no longer friends or friends of friends. They are scattered all over the world.
  This is how the T-post subscriptions works:
  A piece of news with universal appeal is chosen, then re-written and printed on the inside of the back of a t-shirt. The news article is then presented to a designer who makes an original interpretation of that particular article.
  “We print a new t-shirt every five weeks, and there are no back issues,” explains Lundgren. “You also can’t exchange the shirt should you not like it. If you have a subscription to the National Geographic, you can’t send back an issue because you’re not interested in the articles in that specific issue. It’s the same with T-post.”
  T-post features a new designer for each T-shirt, which helps keep the design fresh and unique.
  “I have a clear image of what a T-post t-shirt looks like,” Lundgren says. “And I’m always very careful with what kinds of t-shirts I like myself.”
  T-post has proven to be a much smarter idea than Lundgren initially could imagine. You get an interesting news article, you get an original piece of design, and you get something you can wear.
  If you live in the U.S. a T-post subscription will cost $18 plus $3 in shipping and handling.
  For more information:
  www.tpostmag.com