Peter Lundgren has changed the way T-shirt fiends receive their news bulletins.
His subscription-only publication,
T-post, places the most interesting global news
on T-shirts and distributes them to newshounds around the world every six weeks.
Now located in Stockholm, Peter has made a full-time job out of interpreting fascinating news stories and translating them into designs that keep his subscribers entertained and informed. “The best stories for us are the ones that really engage people. I pick up a story that I can’t stop thinking of and want to grab someone off the street, just to hear his or her opinion on it. That’s the kind of stories we’re striving to put on our issues,” says Peter.
The Russian ninja in Italy is a cracker, and would have to be the most unusual story they’ve ever printed. Peter says, “Our Ninja Confusion issue was pretty unusual. It handles the former Russian soldier Igor’s adventures in the Italian countryside dressed up like a ninja.”
Each design is accompanied by a news caption printed inside at the neckline and this one reads: “Armed with a knife and a bow and arrow, Igor pillaged the hills of northern Italy, robbing rural farmers and disappearing into the night. Dressed in an all-black suit complete with a black head dress, he was virtually invisible in the cover of darkness. His reign of terror continued for weeks as word of the ‘ninja’ quickly spread throughout the countryside. Eventually Igor made the mistake of dropping in on a feisty retired farmer. To his dismay, the old man greeted him with a gunshot. Caught off guard, the ‘ninja’ aborted his mission, hopped on a bicycle and pedalled off into the nearby cornfields. Fortunately, police were quickly on the scene, and the Russian ‘ninja’ was taken into custody.” Outrageous. A story so obviously in need of a T-shirt.
The idea for T-post was born back in 2004 and is now so successful it keeps four people busy – Peter, Arvid, Jakob and Chad – in a perfect little studio on the Umea River. Peter says that when he was working at an ad agency, T-post was just a fun project that he did in between other clients. “I always saw great potential in the project, but realised that I needed to focus on it 100% to get it to take off. In the beginning of 2006 I handed over the agency to my partner, so I could give T-post the chance it deserved. My goal was to not take on any investors along the way. That left me with six months to get the number of subscribers from 300 to a 1000 to still have a job. But after about two months we got a centrefold article in one of the biggest newspapers in The Netherlands, and after that T-post got its own life in newspapers and on the internet.”
Grab a copy of the new T-world issue #04, and go to page 80 to read the rest of this article on T-post.