Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Hitachi inspire the next



My mom brought me this shirt after her most recent conference.
God I hope that someone didn't pay for this shirt. It was probably a freebie from the conference as usual. This time is was in Palm Springs, so it came as a pair with the Computer Using Educators Rocket shirt from a few days ago. My collection is still growing. @_@ If you really wanted one of these I'd bet you could write their staff and get them to send one to you, or just ask me, I'll sell you this one. Other than that, I realize that this could be difficult to get your hands on commercially.
Now that I am over 100 shirts I feel that some of these are superfluous or unnecessary. I like getting free stuff and it's always fun wearing new clothes or mixing up your outfits as often as possible. I just have so many at this point that I really don't care about some of the random companies and their poorly designed promotional materials. Black graphic tees are cool and all, but I am legitimately running out of room! There is no size indicator on the shirt but it feels like a large -as is normal with free shirts-. My one pet peeve with the printing on the back is that they used so much ink over such a large area that it feels as if there is a big piece of plastic or rubber sitting there. Because there is more ink than shirt it get creases and "bacons". After a while it will sometimes get sweaty from sitting against it all day, yuck.
The design itself seems like someone on their brand management or events coordination team wrote the idea for the shirt on a napkin or a quickly worded email and sent it off to China to get printed -well the tag says that the shirt was made in Nicaragua-. The front has the "Hitachi" logo and their current tagline "Inspire the Next". Below that is the product which they were showcasing at their booth that day. It says "Ultimate Interactive Projector", all of this text is centered and on the left side of the chest. They only used one color for all the info on the front, saving some money but losing a lot of quality since the layout appears amateurish, or at least very simple... The back is even worse, though at least they're using 3 colors! I have a feeling that the design specifications went something like this: "The picture on the back needs to feature the whole product projecting onto a screen with these words: 'Changing education as we know it! Introducing the new IPJ-AW250N interactive projector from Hitachi'. Please place a Buddha using the board labeled with the word 'Hitachi'. Also, make it 'pop' or add an explosion or star-burst or something to give it a bit of pizazz. ~Thanks, Tim".
I have absolutely no plan for this shirt. I would probably wear it to an education conference, just to blend in. Other than that it's weird to wear around normally because no one would know or would want to know the product. And if you took it to a place where they did recognize the design, you would want to be wearing a nice collared shirt or a suit, since they would be industry professionals -not to mention they should be embarrassed about the quality of this-. The only positive part of wearing this would be that you are wearing a corporate business shirt from a trade show and it is exclusive. That or that it's so obscure it's ironic.

This shirt is powerful weak. I wore it for the first time today and didn't get a second look, a derogatory remark, or even a question about its origin. Either people are over my random shirts and just glaze over them or -more likely- this is a spectacularly unremarkable shirt that I probably won't wear again anytime soon.

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