MARNEGIE CELLON UNIVERSITY

Buy MCU shirts on Etsy at the MCU Book Shop.

Part culture jamming, part fashion, all fun.

In Fall 2017, I created the first Marnegie Cellon University T-shirt, a project that would become an experiment in the hyper-local subversive. By Fall 2018, MCU can be seen on hundreds of shirts, hats, crop tops, and sweaters. What started as a small experiment in screen printing yielded the premier Carnegie Mellon parody brand.

After a course project was submitted, I repurposed screen printing materials in an effort to realize a dream I had for so long been unable to actualize: a hand made Marnegie Cellon University shirt. Would people notice the subtle change? Would reactions be positive? negative? Somewhere in-between? I didn’t have a clue. All i knew is I had supplies to make a shirt, and I sure as heck was going to make it happen..

Extra supplies from class...

Shoutout to CMU MechE

The first test prints

The first shirt

I started with a single screen, some red ink, emulsion, a 100w ligthbulb, and a couple of white t-shirts I found behind washing machines in my campus laundry... From these, I created my first ever screen-print emulsion.

And then, after I realized I’d messed up the exposure timing, I created my second ever screen-print emulsion! From there, it was just moments before the first MCU shirt was in the world.

But, very quickly other people caught onto the shirt. After printing 3 by hand, I had a dozen people ask to buy them, so, teaming up with a friend, we hand printed 30 more to sell.

At this point, there were almost daily posts on “Overheard/Overseen at CMU” facebook groups, and plenty of attention on snapchat and instagram. So we thought we’d post a link to a Google form just to see if anyone else wanted to buy… and we got hundreds of replies.

When printing by hand wasn’t able to meet the demand, we transitioned into an online storefront allowing MCU customers to place orders that were then totally automatically fulfilled (billing, printing, packing, and shipping) by remote fufillment. Allowing us to focus on other projects while MCU continues to grow. At this point we’ve sold hundreds of Marnegie Cellon branded apparel, and don’t plan to stop anytime soon!