Merch Behind the Scenes - Valentine's Day PJ Pants

Hello, Lovelies!!

It’s me, Eric, from the GG Merch Team! It’s that time again! We’re digging back into the merch depths, pulling back the curtain, parting the kimono, et cetera. We’re going behind the scenes to show you how merch comes together. Today’s kind of a 2-for-1 from WAY WAY back in 2019. We’re going to talk about Valentine’s Day, and we’re going to talk about PJ Pants.

Step One: Concept -

Believe it or not, this was one of the very first things I did on the job. It was late 2019, I was still Suzy’s assistant, and needed to come up with something new for Valentine’s Day 2020. The previous Valentine’s merch was very romantic, with a bunch of roses and saucy looks, so I wanted to do something cuter and cozier - and so I looked to these guys:

(Thank you to www.candyblog.net for the image.)

I hit the old iPad and started doodling around on some concepts. Here’s what I came up with:

I knew I wanted to do PJ Pants, and was pretty settled on a t-shirt to match them. The obviously late addition of “Spider Kiss” here makes me laugh, but I didn’t know all the references yet! I had just started, which is also my excuse for why my doodles of the Grump Heads look like that.

After fleshing out the idea for the shirt graphic here, I decided that we needed to go with pink-on-pink-on-pink instead of the full color range used in the candy hearts. A lot of times with design, simpler is better because it can get to the core of an idea right away. When people think of Valentine’s Day, they don’t think of green and purple and orange and yellow - they think PINK! So pink it is.

Step Two: Artwork!

I knew from the second that I started, I wanted @Krooked_Glasses to do the art for the shirt. They defined the modern Grump Head, how could I not ask them to do a design with the Grump Heads so prominent? Luckily, she’s a pro and took my rough idea and effortlessly perfected it. This is one of those situations where basically the first thing I got back was perfect.

The idea of their heads being candy hearts didn’t really translate into the final version, which actually worked out! Because it turns out, getting custom PJ Pants made starting from scratch takes a really long time! So this shirt launched solo for Valentine’s in 2020.

While this design was being finished, I was finishing the final version of the pattern for the PJ pants. Since this is behind the scenes, I can show you an earlier version (that never made it to full Pattern status):

And the final:

You can see the colors match the shirt and we got rid of Spiarmf and replaced him with Slurmp because of the confusing line-break in the name.

Step 3: Developing the PJs

Since there was no Holiday deadline, and I had plenty of time to sit inside and dig through some older files that never made it to print (remember mid-2020? Lots of free time.) - I came across this awesome pattern that Rachel (@vanduobones) and Suzy (@mort3mer) had worked on before I started.

And Arin had requested I make a Pajama shirt to go along with the Pajama Pants. I’m not typically a Pajama Shirt wearer, so I went looking around for some good, comfy looking PJ shirts to send to our suppliers for reference. I landed on this image of Ryan Gosling wearing a PJ shirt:

(Hi Ryan)

The supplier nailed it in one, and the rest is history!

Once again, it’s been such a pleasure to show y’all some of the design process behind the merch!

What do you think? Does seeing the process help you appreciate it a little more? If you already had the shirt, do you love it even more now?? Let us know what else you’d like to see Behind the Scenes of in the GG Merch world! Drop a comment below!

‘Til next time!

-Eric