Stay still: the making of our spring photo shoot

We’ve had a relationship with the Hershey Volunteer Fire Department since the day we launched Stay Apparel Co. in October 2017. We developed our Station 48 tee in conjunction with the fire department, and every penny from the sale of the tee benefits the department’s capital campaign.

We have a deep appreciation for the brave men and women who give of their time — not one member receives compensation — and risk their lives to protect our hometown. We’re also grateful to the department for granting us access to gorgeous Station 48 for part of our May 2019 photo shoot.

We’ll be sharing the fruits of our shoot on our Instagram and Facebook pages for months to come, but above and below are some samples, along with explanations of some of what you’re seeing.

An abiding respect for the past informs the look of our tees, whether our original designs or the retro designs (The Flying Machine, Garvin’s, Helb’s Keystone Brewery, Herpak Franks) featuring brands of yesteryear. It also inspires many of the props we incorporate into our shoots.

For this picnic shot, showcasing our latest York tee, our model is drinking a can of Moxie, America’s first mass-produced soft drink. You can learn much more about Moxie here.

A decade ago, we purchased these retro aluminum lawn chairs from Lawn Chair USA of Fort Pierce, Fla., ostensibly for use watching youth baseball games. They’ve witnessed a fair number of innings and lots of sunshine with the original webbing still intact. We thought they were a fitting complement to our backyard shoot.

Is there a better bargain going than a Wiffle-brand plastic bat and ball, which our local supermarket sells for $2.99? Shelton, Conn.-based, family-owned Wiffle has provided backyard fun since 1953 and was enshrined in the Toy Hall of Fame in 2017. We can only hope that we have such Staying power.

Thumbing through an old Hershey Bears game program, we came across an ad for Dominion hockey sticks. Incredibly, we learned, they were made for only a short period of time in Hummelstown, Pa., next to Hershey.

We tracked down one of the sticks and found a photo of Willie Marshall, the American Hockey League’s all-time scoring leader and one-time Hershey Bear, holding a Dominion stick in a photo with his Baltimore Clippers teammates.

This quilt, a wonderfully thoughtful and beautifully crafted gift to us, features every Stay tee to date. If you look closely, you’ll see stars and stripes stitching, an homage to our focus on offering only U.S.-made tees and accessories.