Haters are going to hate, the American Flag story

Aloha, normally we keep our noses out of politics and focused on our clothing brand, but today we are going to make an exception. As many of our customers will attest, Wave Shoppe produces a specialty shirt that is so messed up and ugly looking that it has been officially (and appropriately)  named the ugly Hawaiian shirt

Sample Ugly Shirt

The shirts are in step with patchwork shirts, we lay out 1 layer of each fabric on hand and then cut it up and make "patchwork" Hawaiian shirts from it. The designs and colors we use can be anything from traditional Hawaiian designs to some oddball prints like fabric with Santa or a old car, even the American Flag.

The story behind using flag material goes way back to when we started receiving requests for our service men and women for ugly shirts that contained something patriotic like the flag sewn into the mix. So being supportive of our service members we had no choice but to rise to the occasion and make them. Once word got out amongst the troops we had military contractors calling us wanting to buy Ugly Shirts in bulk. Even a general and his staff at Centcom wanted in on the action.

CJ2

We also got a lot of requests from troops stationed in Afghanistan for shirts with not only the flag, but also cigars. They apparently had makeshift cigar clubs in the middle east and wanted to go all out. Yep, you guessed right, we added cigar material.

Cigar club

So noting the popularity of the flag material with our active military, we began to randomly include flag material during regular production, that way everyone has a small chance at getting flag in their shirt.

So a few weeks ago we sold a couple of Ugly Shirts on our Amazon store and about a week later we received a inquiry about returning the purchase. What bothered us is that the customer said they were returning the shirts not because of a defect, or that they simply didn't like them, but because of the flag material. They stated that they didn't like the American flag, even if it was upside down.

I will be honest, that comment made me angry. Having a grandfather that fled Czechoslovakia to come here to fight in WWI with the US Army, I couldn't believe someone took offence to our flag. I refunded the purchase in its entirety as soon as we received it from the customer, but its a dam shame that some in our society have become lost souls without conviction or patriotism.

As I thought more and more about this I decided that my reaction to all of this is to produce a higher percentage of Ugly Shirts with flag material. And if one day I have the capitol, maybe a ultra patriotic American Flag shirt composed of multiple flag styles/designs. One thing for sure, patriotism will not be a unspoken or forgotten word in our household or business.