A new year, a bolder path for Stay Apparel Co.

Stay Apparel Co. is well into its sixth year of existence, and I still love our flag logo.

It’s simple and clean with a vintage feel to it. The only flaw was that “Apparel Co.” was so thin that it didn’t reproduce legibly at small sizes.

We had noticed this as early as 2018 when we printed the logo on dog collars. It was an issue again in November 2022 when our logo appeared on a T-shirt among the sponsors of a Thanksgiving 5K race, and once more in December when we were working on a Stay postcard.

Alex Yarrish, the graphic artist behind the postcard and our Pennsylvania Bigfoot Believers design, messaged me:

“Working with the logo at this size made me notice how the ‘Apparel Co.’ really gets lost when it's small. I wonder if you'd be open to tweaking the logo to a bolder, more readable font in the new year.”

In fact, we debuted the reworked logo (Vortice is the new font) before Christmas on our website and have begun incorporating it on the yoke of our tees (photo above) as we reprint existing designs and introduce new ones. We’re now using our secondary flag logo, which does not include a flag pole, on the tees.

Website updates

Besides these tangible changes, the logo tweak also holds symbolic value for us as we consider 2023 to be a pivotal year in Stay’s history.

We’ve initiated a review of our website’s architecture, which is largely unchanged since its debut in October 2017. We want to make it more user friendly, especially for customers shopping on their phones.

Our goal is to minimize scrolling for customers because even relatively minor inconveniences can be the difference between a sale and a lost opportunity. We expect to have the website changes in place by early spring.

We pride ourselves on delivering great customer service and, for online orders, turning them around as quickly as possible.

By far, most of our sales occur at our pop-up appearances. We spent part of January solidifying our show schedule for 2023.

The challenge with pop-ups is that most of them occur on Saturdays. It’s hard to grow a business when you’re not out and about the rest of the week.

So we will be making a concerted effort this year to find some kind of a permanent brick-and-mortar presence to which we can steer customers.

At five years and counting, Stay needs to do bold things.