Search for a hoodie featuring almost any car manufacturer and you will find hundreds, from sellers who have no relationship with that manufacturer whatsoever. It is the default in this category. We decided early not to do it, for two separate reasons.
The first reason is that it isn't ours
A manufacturer's name, badge and model designations are trademarks. The purpose of a trademark is to identify who made something, and putting one on a garment you produced says, to anyone looking at it, that the garment came from them. Licensing exists precisely so that this can happen legitimately, and the brands that matter in this space enforce it — several run permanent brand-protection programmes whose entire job is finding listings and removing them.
The same applies to photographs. A picture of a car carries its own copyright, held by whoever took it, entirely separate from any rights in the car itself. A stock licence almost never covers printing that image on goods for resale. Two separate permissions, both usually missing.
None of that is a grey area, and the fact that a lot of sellers do it anyway does not make it one. It just means most of them have not been caught yet.
The second reason is that it's bad design
This one matters more to us.
Printing a badge is not designing anything. The work was done decades ago by someone at the manufacturer, and reproducing it at 300mm across a chest is a scaling operation, not a creative one. The result is a garment whose entire visual argument is I like this company — which is a fine thing to feel and a thin thing to wear.
There is also the small matter of what it looks like. A large manufacturer's mark across the front of a sweatshirt reads as promotional clothing, because that is what it is. The people who care most about cars are, in our experience, the least likely to want to be a walking advertisement for one.
What we do instead
The marks we print are drawn from the coachbuilding trade rather than borrowed from a manufacturer — Coachbuilt, Concours, Patina, Grand Touring. Words with precise meanings to anyone who knows the subject, and no meaning at all to anyone who doesn't.
The Type Series goes further and takes the format rather than the content: a manufacturer's spec sheet layout, applied to models that do not exist, with figures we made up. The format is the artefact. We own it outright.
It is a narrower proposition than printing a famous badge, and it sells to fewer people. It is also a brand rather than a print shop, and it cannot be taken away by a letter from somebody's lawyers.
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