Celebrity culture complicates life in Westerly a little

SWIFT ACTION: J. Mack Studios owner Kevin Adam estimates he sold about 100 Taylor Swift T-shirts before being asked to stop by the pop star’s representatives. / COURTESY J. MACK STUDIOS
SWIFT ACTION: J. Mack Studios owner Kevin Adam estimates he sold about 100 Taylor Swift T-shirts before being asked to stop by the pop star’s representatives. / COURTESY J. MACK STUDIOS

It was business as usual in Westerly this year until pop star Taylor Swift came to town. The singer’s purchase of a $17 million mansion on the beach in exclusive Watch Hill added celebrity sightings and trespassing dramas to sandcastles, fudge and the usual seaside entertainment. At screenprinting company J. Mack Studios, owner Kevin Adams occasionally uses T-shirts as a creative outlet and decided to design and produce a Swift-inspired shirt in honor of his hometown’s new most famous resident. While Adams never found out what Swift thought of his shirt, he did hear from corporate protectors of the Taylor Swift brand who asked him to stop, setting off a David-versus-Goliath gossip-column sensation.

PBN: Some of the accounts of your brush with Taylor Swift’s people seem pretty sensational. What really happened?
ADAMS: I have daughters who are 15 and 17 and both are Taylor Swift fans. Honestly, it was pretty exciting to have a major celebrity buy a house in our town, and we like to try to have some fun as screenprinters coming up with creative ideas. I had an idea to make a T-shirt with her image on it pulled off the Internet. My graphic artist Ken Lowell and I brainstormed and found a good image and decided to make it pop arty by putting a kind of Andy-Warhol flare on it. We thought the image was great and put some text on it that was funny. We put “OMG Watch Hill?” with a look of excitement like we couldn’t believe she bought a house in Watch Hill. We did it for fun with no intention of selling it. We put it on our Facebook page and it generated a lot of buzz there.
So then I decided to make up some screens and print up a few. We made about four dozen and people wanted to buy them, so we sold a few and sold some to Woodees, a local retailer. And then The Westerly Sun picked up on it and called me up for an interview. But right before that I got a call from someone in Nashville who introduced himself as her brand representative and wanted to know if we were making this T-shirt. He told us to cease and desist. He was trying to throw his weight around to do his job, which I’m sure is to stop people from profiting off of Taylor Swift. I Googled him, and he was the real deal. I spoke to my attorney and the image we used is out in the public all over the Internet, and anybody could grab it for free. The shirt does not say her name and if anyone had an issue with what I was doing, it would have been the photographer, but no one contacted me saying you can’t use the photo.

PBN: Do you think Taylor Swift ever saw the shirt?
ADAMS: I don’t think Taylor Swift could care I made this shirt; I don’t think she even knows about it. I think her people were just trying to do their job, but once it was in The Westerly Sun it blew up from there to the point it was getting ridiculous. I was getting calls from celebrity-gossip sites like Radar Online to do interviews. From there all the quotes started to get a little sensationalized.

PBN: So what happened to the T-shirts?
ADAMS: I sold some to Woodees. I sold a handful to people who just came into my shop. I am not a retailer – I am a wholesale operation doing screenprinting and embroidery for companies, organizations, quantity stuff – so I am not set up to sell retail. In the end I think we sold about 100 T-shirts. That’s it. I did not get rich off of this. My daughters and their friends wanted some shirts. Some people who read the stories wanted a shirt. But since it blew up in the press, the guy from Nashville stopped calling me. He decided to leave it alone or someone from her camp in Westerly said leave the small screenprinter alone. … I never got a cease-and-desist letter.

PBN: Small-batch specialty shirts seem like something that has been disrupted by the Internet and by Web startups like Teespring, to give a Rhode Island example, that allow people to design shirts online and get them made very quickly. Has that changed screenprinting at all?
ADAMS: It has. I don’t know how people are OK with that, with buying custom T-shirts over the Internet from a company based in wherever. But it is affecting the local screenprinter.

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PBN: What segment of the market are they reaching?
ADAMS: I would say typically the smaller order, the 12-to-50 piece order for schools, organizations, plumbers. But major clients are not going to buy screenprinted T-shirts from an online company. I sit with my customers, visit them and discuss their orders, send them virtual proofs. It is a relationship.

PBN: Is digital printing taking away from traditional screenprinting techniques?
ADAMS: There is a technology that started around nine years ago called direct-to-garment printers – think of it like an Epson printer on a shirt. It is a very cool technology, but in volume it doesn’t make sense to use those machines. Those machines are great for one-piece orders, small orders. But for a volume run they aren’t cost effective.
I really try to stick with the bigger orders and relationships. I like to work with clients that need apparel and try to be a one-stop shop. We also do embroidery and promotional items: pens, mugs, water bottles, backpacks, towels, flashlights and umbrellas – anything you can put a company logo on. •INTERVIEW
Kevin Adams
Position: Owner of J. Mack Studios
Background: A Mystic, Conn., native, Adams got a job working for an apparel wholesaler to the screenprinting industry out of high school before spending time working for his father, who ran a hat importing company. After having three children, Adams settled in his wife’s hometown of Westerly and founded his own screenprinting business.
Education: Saint Bernard High School, Montville, Conn.
First Job: Landscaping
Residence: Westerly
Age: 50

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