Days are getting darker and it’s ever more important to see your mates and have fun in order to stay sane. With Kasperi we headed down to Baribal, to play pool. Our usual weapon of choice during winter, not that we’re any good tho. But, that’s fun and takes the mind off the day to day hassle.
It’s been over a year since our last merch tees. And that has given us time to wonder and reflect. I started to sketch out the graphics some time in June. All we had decided was that we were gonna do long sleeves next. More importantly, we wanted to do sleeve hits.
After a while of drawing and going around in circles, I felt like I had reached a creative dead-end. Some part of me wanted to do an actual fire graphic for the sleeves, but I just couldn’t make them to make sense with what we’re about. So, for a month or so, I was staring at a blank page. Maybe all the noise of the day to day shopkeeping and social media didn’t get my creative juices going, who could’ve guessed.
Then finally during my short, but effective, summer vacay I picked up the pen again. I started thinking about BSM and my original inspirations, when we started doing this whole thing. I got back to the roots and the core of Black Spot.
R.L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island was my favourite book when I was a kid. It's a coming-of-age story about buccaneers and burried treasure in the 1700s. Pirates have always been really fascinating to me. Black Spot is a term coined by mister Stevenson in his book. Black spot is a message on paper or playing card, signifying the verdict of accused pirates. Depending on the occasion, it means either mutiny or their intended death at the hands of other pirates. Terms origins are in the historical tradition of Caribbean pirates of showing an ace of spades to a person condemned as traitor or informer.
Years later, in my early teens, I saw Johnny Depp’s interview, where he tells about how he draw parallels between the 18th century pirates and modern day Rockstars, when preparing for the role of Jack Sparrow. That has been something that just stuck to my head. Match made in heaven. Two cool things that I had fell in love ever since I was a kid, pirates and rock n’ roll. The stage was set.
In 2018, I started to play around with the idea of making my own brand. Together with Kasperi, we created our own little brand combining pirates and rock n' roll. Then in early 2019 we started digging and dealing all kinds of old treasures to likeminded misfits.
After going through all our old moodboards the ispiration finally struck me. We needed our own Jolly Roger. A true symbol for the free misfits and ragamuffins. So, that’s the short story, why the fuck our new tees have a skull and crossbones on the back.
The other shirt took on the life of its own. Drawing inspiration from urban exploring and taking the public space back to the public. 'Keys to the city' was pretty much the working title for this one. The tee features our Dude with bolt cutters strolling around. Graff life and so forth.
To make these more special we wanted to overdye the tees, which resulted in one of a kind tees. Uniqueness is one of the things we hold dear, and why we think vintage is so cool. All tees are different shade and uneven topped with white contrast stitching. Printed here in Helsinki. Super limited as usual, since nothing has changed since we started, we still hate mass production. Jolly Roger and Keys to the City tees now available in store.
Cheers,
Santeri, BSM
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