Five New Benefit Tees Are Now Available for Presale
We’ve been showing you stickers, buttons, tote bags and bits and pieces of what we’ve been working on behind the scenes. Now the big ones are here.
Five Heather Doherty Benefit T-shirt designs are officially available for presale.
Every shirt was created specifically for the benefit, and each one tells a slightly different part of the story. Some are about the music. Some are about surviving a truly terrible situation. Some are about neighbours showing up for each other. And, naturally, Harley makes an appearance.
The shirts are being professionally screen printed locally in Toronto, and we’re doing a limited first run. Presales help us figure out which designs and sizes people actually want before everything goes to print—and, more importantly, help us cover the upfront cost of producing the merchandise.
Five Designs, One Very Good Reason
The collection includes five different designs, so we wanted them to feel like actual shirts you’d want to keep wearing long after November 1.
There’s Good Music for Bad Times, which pretty much sums up the entire reason this benefit exists. Things can be awful and complicated and unfair, and sometimes getting a room full of people together to play music is one of the few useful things you can actually do about it.
Good Songs for Good Neighbours puts Harley front and centre alongside the pink guitar and flowers that have become such a big part of the benefit artwork. It’s the softer side of the collection and a little love letter to the people who show up when somebody in their neighbourhood needs them.
Trial by Fire goes in the opposite direction. A phoenix rises from the flames in a design about surviving something that should never have happened in the first place. It isn't about pretending that losing your home has some neat inspirational lesson attached to it. Sometimes surviving is enough.
And the other designs carry pieces of the same story: music, bad circumstances, good people and the strange things that can happen when a bunch of people decide to help.
Why Presale?
Printing shirts is one of the biggest upfront expenses for the benefit.
Ordering now means your shirt is reserved in your chosen design and size before the first run is printed.
It also means that money starts working for the benefit immediately. The goal of the merchandise has always been simple: cover the cost of making it, then put the proceeds toward helping Heather with immediate living expenses and the ongoing cleanup and recovery of her home following the fire.
Heather was uninsured and lost essentially everything. There is still an enormous amount of work ahead.
A T-shirt obviously doesn't fix that.
But a whole bunch of T-shirts can pay for something that does.
Made Here, for Here
The shirts will be professionally screen printed in Toronto rather than produced through a print-on-demand service. We wanted these to feel like proper benefit-show shirts: the kind you buy at a merch table, wear until they're ridiculously soft and eventually remember exactly where they came from.
This is a limited benefit run, and we're not planning to keep an endless inventory of every design and size. Presale is the best way to make sure you get the one you want.
And if shirts aren't your thing, there is more coming. Stickers are already available, with buttons, totes, the Trial by Fire benefit zine and other pieces making their way into the shop.
The merch table is getting increasingly out of control.
Which, in this particular case, is exactly what we want.
All five T-shirt designs are available for presale now in the Bad Times General Store.
Buy a shirt. Wear it to the show. Wear it after the show.
Help us turn some good music and good merch into something useful for Heather.