Geeky pop-culture awesomeness, being real, and running a brilliant shop.
New York based The Chop Shop makes sharp, clever, nerdy tees.

Rumplo I get the feeling from your about page that Chop Shop started out as a design company that turned an eye toward T-shirts—Is this a fair way of putting it? If so, how does your experience as a design company influence the shirts you make?
ChopShop No, we are a design company also called The Chopping Block which has designed the sites for major companies like Turner Classic Movies, Rachael Ray and Bravo to name a few. Additionally we have also been the providers of web presence for major entertainment icons such as the bands Phish, They Might be Giants (1997-2007) and Trey Anastasio’s solo efforts and others.
The Products side of the Chopping Block was always going to be called Chop Shop all the way back in 1997 when we started. It took us ten years to find a way to get a whole site, identity and enough products to justify a site to get chopshopstore.com up and running. You know how all those pesky clients and their work get in the way. ;)

Rumplo T-shirts have taken on a pretty significant role in pop-culture, and you guys pay homage to a number of pop-culture icons in your shirts. What do you make of that?
ChopShop Really, it is all about being nerds. We see these people walking around with tape around their glasses and programmers on wheels and its funny to us… but we really dig these people. Many of them just don’t care what other people think of them and it is really sort of an empowering thing, right? Our two illustrations of guys dressed up as characters from Tron are really inspired by that Maynard fella we all saw back in 1998 (i am guessing). You have to have some real gusto to dress up in some skin tight outfit that glows in the dark and publish it online for all the world to see. Surely he had no idea that half the world would see it, but there is a good chance most of your surrounding community of friends and relations will. Many of these people have become oddball celebrities in their own right. Some folks might think it is more like infamy, but we don’t.

But apart from that, much of what makes these people tick are sci-fi movies, television shows, video games and as with most generations… we love to collect the memories and nostalgic items that make up our past. We are big nerds too and as much as we think we are outside that arena, the truth is that we talk about action script code outside of work, we watch the new Battlestar Galactica series and still talk about Star Wars as if the movie came out last week instead of 1977. There was nothing more entertaining than working on the weRobot and AlienWe designs and in some cases re-discovering some characters that still reside in our collected memories. Some of these are embarrassingly awful to admit having liked even as kids, but in many cases that is exactly what we love about them too. At any rate they are all embraced from the awful to the genius.

Rumplo Considering that pop-culture status what, if anything, do you think will change about the T-shirt industry in the next few years?
ChopShop Hopefully people will always want to have their likes and additions emblazoned on their tee shirts. Its really been happening since Elvis which was the first real concert tee ever. Then consider the 70’s and early 80’s with all those heavy metal black tees you saw everywhere. Its been around for some time now its only opened up to a wider audience. At one time not too long ago the only one-liner you could find on a tee shirt was “I’m with Stupid” and now there are millions of them that can be based on anything from a single scene in a movie to a 6 minute skit from Saturday Night Live. We have just become more open to being more creative in the making of them and and the general population has become more expressive with wearing of them.
The next big thing though… Pants.

Rumplo (laughter) Your website is amazing. What do people say about it? Do you think it adds to your geek cred and helps sell shirts?
ChopShop I hope so. right now its too slow and we are fixing that. It wasn’t designed to handle thousands of hits in a single hour and we were more focused on the making it cool and interactive than what if tons of people want to actually make purchases all at once. So it is having some growing pains right now but we hope to have that ironed out in a few weeks to be able to handle the instantaneous traffic slams that come with no warning as well as looking really great. First and foremost Chop Shop is a part of a graphic design company, so it will never get ugly. We might have some quick fixes up for the next few months depending on where we are on the new developments, but as well as selling tees… its a portfolio piece.

Rumplo Do you think you'll ever design tees that are dramatically different then the sci-fi / geek orinted tees you're making now?
ChopShop Hard to know. There were some designs that we have nixed because they didn’t fit in with us so well. We like funny, but we also like elegant which is kind of what lead to the “collections” tees like weRobot, The Internets and the new alienWe designs. I think what could be interesting is finding ways to still be funny, geeky and yet elegant about it at the same time.
Another direction that is very likely is not focusing on any one genre of pop-culture, but opening that up more to other arenas. There are things people nerd out about like motorcycles, sports and other things… we just don’t think about them as nerds. But think about how nerdy it really is to figure out the stats on your favorite teams batting average. What dorks.

Rumplo Does Rachael Ray wear your T-shirts?
ChopShop No, not yet. She is a food nerd and as I was saying above. There are other arenas to explore.

Rumplo What kind of T-shirts are you guys working on right now? Care to give us a sneak peek?
ChopShop We are going to try and see how some of the current designs translate to kids sizes and want to get more in women’s styles. There are whole new concepts in the works and I would tell you of them, except then I would have to kill you.
Hey… there’s a tee shirt concept in that line. No?

The End Thanks a million to Chop Shop for their time and for their insightful thinking. Be sure to check out the Chop Shop store in all it's geeky goodness and pick up a few tees.