CINCINNATI — Sometimes creating a t-shirt design comes easy, and other times it doesn’t.
“It’s always the little throw away designs, if you want to say that, that sometimes takes off,” said Cincy Shirts designer Kyle Mitchell.
The Cincy Shirts team has a group chat where they discuss different shirt designs. In that group chat, "Run, Hubbard, Run" was born.
“It’s just cool to make little moments, moments of Cincinnati history and just turn that into something that should have been done and over in 90 seconds, or however long it took him [Sam Hubbard] to run that and make it into something that people can hold onto and to cherish,” he said.
Mitchell said it takes anywhere from 15 minutes to 3 hours to come up with a new shirt design.
So, do they come up with their designs so fast?
Mitchell noted he prefers to sketch on a laptop. He gathers all the elements they want to be in a design and starts creating it. He adds a lot of little details pop up in the design process and roughly 75% of those details make the final cut.
He added Cincy Shirts draws from various pop culture references as inspiration like Forrest Gump running down the street. He noted often their best shirt designs are the ones they think won’t do that well. Mitchell didn’t think the Hubbard shirts would be as popular as they have been.
Cincy Shirts has also received national recognition for their Damar Hamlin shirt designs. The shirt worn by Cincinnati Bengals player Ted Karras will be displayed in the NFL Hall of Fame.
“One of my favorite things is to see how we can make an impact and to see designs travel and to obviously make an impact and help Damar,” Mitchell said. “To know that one of our designs is going to be in the NFL Hall of Fame is, it’s just weird and something I didn’t think was possible, and like I said it’s not the way I planned to make it into the hall of fame, but I’ll take it.”
The Cincinnati Bengals play the Buffalo Bills Sunday night, and if the Bengals win it’ll be back to the drawing board for Cincy Shirts.
