What's the strangest story someone has told you for a tee shirt?
Everything about I Love Boxie is strange. Nobody ever gets in touch and
says 'I went to the park today and had a great day with my family, can
I have a T shirt about that?'  People write in and call with stories
about the moments that don't hang in picture frames – broken love
affairs, people they shouldn't have slept with, things they're furious
about, things that started to happen and stopped too soon and grief.
That makes us sound like a self help group. We are sometimes. But
mostly, Boxie is a die hard, upbeat advocacy of existence – bruises and
all. Our best selling tee is 'hey you and I are going to have a big
love affair and it won't work but somewhere in the middle, my god, we
tried.' Boxie is about the part where you tried. Our clients always
talk to us late at night. There's no small talk and the heart of the
story is got to in frank detail. The same with those who write to us.
Our client then pays for his/her T Spoke but they have no idea what the
line is until they open the tee a few days later in the mail so there's
a huge suspense/surprise factor. Basically, strange is not strange
here.

What would a great 2009 look like for boxie?
Getting to America. We're set up in London now, with helpers that can
watch the shop so it feels like it's time to go on the road again.
Suddenly America has the same lure to it like it did in the late
80s/early 90s – somewhere where something is going on and you want to
be in on it or at least just there to make the T shirts. The plan is to
journey across, stopping a stranger for a tale every few miles and
re-telling the story of America on T spokes. When we reach California,
we'll look back at a mad sprawl of a story which has to be worth
something.

What inspired you to do what you¹re doing?
Some years ago, I went out with a T shirt maker. When we broke up I
gave him 237 pages I'd written to say goodbye. He gave me a T shirt
saying the same. The T shirt was better.  At the same time, I was stuck
at writing and my day job. I'd always been fixed on big end goals – by
the time I was 30, I wanted to have written and made a movie, by the
time I was 31, a novel. I got perfection-obsessed, would spend two days
taking a comma out of a sentence and soon my words stopped making sense
and were packaging for a heart that wasn't there. Then last summer, I
stopped. I decided that I was never going to write a book, I was never
going to make the movie, I was just going to make 3 or 4 good T shirts
in my life and that would be OK. Everything changed. It's not about
distillation – but finding the truth. The truth is always just a line.

How busy are you?
In November we were in some magazines and T spokes kicked off. On top
of that we sell a lot of our regular line tees. The process of getting
the T spoke is pretty quick. An ad hoc rule is if you don't get the
line in the first 5 minutes of hearing the story then you won't get it.
But there are some that can take longer. A girl wrote in and said her
parents had pushed her to be an Olympic horse-rider from an early age.
She developed all sorts of eating disorders so she'd sit lighter on the
horse, then one night, she walked through town and got attacked. That
pushed everything over the edge and she had to give up riding. Now, she
was finally OK, and at the age of 15, she wanted to put all this behind
her with a T spoke that wouldn't be at all specific. We couldn't get
the line and nearly gave her a refund. Then we got- 'I lost it all on
the horses, now I'm back on track.' She was thrilled. That takes a lot
of time, but I have an imaginary assistant called Christopher and an
email address for him. He gets cc'ed on emails whenever anything goes
wrong, thereby implying it's Christopher's fault.  

Where do you get your energy from?!
This is such a good time to be alive. There's something momentous and
connected going on especially if you have creative aspirations. The old
way is crumbling – the people who put creativity in a locked box and
said you had to pay for a peek, and taking with them the ideas that you
need X amount of cash to make something or more production values.
Suddenly that stuff seems so old fashioned now. Sharing, openness,
generosity of information, immediacy – everything the web's taught us
is bleeding back into life. The people I meet are so free with their
ideas and helping you or hooking you up with someone who can – it's
real hippy stuff and it feels like what's going on is the beginnings of
an awesome creative movement focussed on the process and not the end
and making stuff, no matter how small. And I get energy from thinking
about the possibilities of T shirts. How more than a vote or a roof
over their head most people in the world seem to own a T shirt.