We Found Hundreds Of Random Autopian Shirts And We’re Going To Give Them To New Members – Tales From The Slack

Normally, Tales From The Slack is a post only for members. Today, we’re opening that post up to non-members because it turns out we have more than a hundred random shirts someone found in a back room at Galpin we need to give away. So if you sign up to become a Vinyl or above member you’re going to get all the normal member gear, plus a bonus t-shirt in your size.

Obviously, if you’re a returning Vinyl+ member you’re going to get the new t-shirt, a limited edition custom Autopian pin, and perhaps a little more. If you’re a Cloth member, you’ll get the sweet sweet $50 annual price. But if you’re a new Vinyl, Velour, or RCL member (or, hell, if you upgrade to Vinyl/Velour) we’re going to send you one of these shirts.

In fact, we don’t just have these shirts, we also have a few random ones from Syd that she made and forgot to send us for a year. These arrived a couple of weeks ago and we’ve added them to the pile. It’s kinda amazing, I gotta show you how this happened since this is Tales From The Slack:

That “all mediums” reference is because Jeff, the man behind the curtain for a lot of our adventures, ordered t-shirts when the site was launched. Most of these shirts got stuffed in a corner somewhere. One day the nice folks at Galpin Auto Sports found a box of shirts and they were, as you guessed, all medium.

I assumed that some of the shirts David found were just those shirts in other sizes. And It’s true, those were some of the shirts he found, but then he found a bunch of other random stuff.

I

Here’s the video, btw:

These were, indeed, the print-on-demand shirts we made two years ago for Black Friday. Here’s what they look like:

We sold some of these shirts via Print-On-Demand, but it turns out we needed to price them too high in order to make actual money and we felt bad charging that much. Eventually, we’ll have a new setup to sell shirts with Galpin, though that process has been a little slow and it’s on my list of things to do next year.

I’m going “uhhhh” because I worried that we printed $5,000 worth of shirts. After doing a forensic accounting analysis we found… no evidence we paid for these shirts. This sent me into a panic because I thought maybe people ordered them and they got sent to us by accident, so then I had to go back through all of our shopping vendor receipts and order data to make sure that wasn’t the case. Thankfully, it wasn’t.

The reality is we have no idea why we got these extra shirts. My guess is we decided to order some back in 2022 to display or something, and they got lost in a backroom. Our mistake, your benefit.

Here are some piles of shirts:

And here are some more:

In spite of David’s initial enthusiasm, it turns out there were roughly 165 shirts, not including the shirts we got from Syd and a few other places. I think we have about 200-300 shirts in total.

That is still a lot of shirts. So here’s how this works:

1. Become a new Vinyl, Velour, or RCL member, and in addition to all the stuff you’ll regularly get (including the new Autopian member shirt) you’ll get a bonus t-shirt in your size. You can’t pick the shirt, we’ll just randomly pick it and toss it in.
2. We will do this until we run out of shirts in specific sizes. I don’t know what sizes we have, but hypothetically if there are 18 mediums then the first 18 people who sign up who are mediums get the shirts. The 19th will not. Everyone else will get shirts until the sizes are out.
3. I do know that we have sizes from S-3XL, though, again, I’m not sure of the exact ratios.

Here are some answers to questions I’m sure you’ll have:

• Couldn’t you just sell these? It turns out that there’s such a huge variety in random colors and individual sizes that it would honestly be more work than it’s worth to us and we’d sell out of stuff individually rather quickly.
• What if I upgrade from Cloth to another level? Would that work? Sure. If you upgrade from Cloth to Vinyl+ then we’ll also send you a shirt. New Cloth members are not eligible for this deal.
• Can I see what the shirts look like? No, even I don’t know. But the video above gives you a sense of what we have, as do the photos.
• How long do you think this deal will last? No idea.
• I signed up last week, does this apply to me? Yes! If you signed up after we posted the new shirt design and haven’t been shipped anything yet we’ll apply this to you as well.
• Does this apply to gifts? Yes, it does, here are the gift links: Please note that, for practical reasons, we’re only doing annual subscriptions as a gift. If you’re a commenter these should be able to be activated by you and tied to your current commenter account:
  • GIFT CLOTH ANNUAL – $50
  • GIFT VINYL ANNUAL – $100
  • GIFT VELOUR ANNUAL – $250
  • GIFT RICH CORINTHIAN LEATHER – $1,000

  By the way, if anyone actually gifts RCL we will send an extra member shirt for whomever made the gift as a thank-you bonus.

Membership is super important and helps keep this place running. If you can support us, it means a lot. If you’re a renewing member, we promise you’ll get a bunch of great stuff as well.