Today marks the two year anniversary of the release of the Peter P. Peculiar shirt and I want to let you in on a few lesser-known facts about the shirt! The idea for the shirt was birthed during a casual conversation with my sister in March 2012. I showed her a graphic that I was working on and she said, “he looks like his name is Peter!” We continued to make a series of jokes about this fictional “Peter” character and eventually she said, “you need to put him on a shirt!”
Over the next few minutes we threw around ideas about how to make Peter the nerdiest character on the block. “His name should be Peter P. Peculiar and he should be a stickler about not abbreviating his name! He should wear huge glasses all the time and he should have a name tag with his name and an ID number on it.” I didn’t want to lose the surge of creativity that was flowing, so I immediately went to work on the shirt and when I was happy with it, I posted a mockup of it on Facebook for my friends to react to.
The feedback was overwhelmingly positive with comments such as, “I’ll take one in every color, thanks!” “…mesmerizing…” “I LOVE IT!! I wanttttt!!” “Such a cute little hipster! Love the glasses” and “ohh, he’s soo cute!” After seeing this, it was obvious that I had to make this shirt into a reality, but first I had to put a Peculiar PPL spin on it.
First, I added two secret messages to the tag of the shirt. I do this to all Peculiar PPL t-shirts because people usually ignore the tags of their shirts. When was the last time that you bought a shirt and immediately read its care instructions on the tag? Since this is an often overlooked part of the shirt, I knew that I had to make it special with two secret messages on it. The goal was for the owner of the shirt to randomly notice the writing one day after owning it for several months and then immediately smile and feel uplifted. (If you own a Peculiar PPL t-shirt, you should check out the tag right now, if you haven’t already.)
Then, on the back of the shirt I put a “hi my name is” name tag that was never shown on any advertised product images. I wanted to make sure that this graphic was a pleasant surprise to people since they wouldn’t have seen this graphic until they received the shirt to their door. The name tag was on the back of the shirt and it said, “Hello my name is Peter P. Peculiar.” Then, on the bottom of the name tag, it says “ID # 1PE2V9.” Most people would assume that 1PE2V9 was the result of me ferociously banging on the keyboard, but it is actually an insider message. In the bible, there’s a scripture verse in 1 Peter 2 verse 9 that says, “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people…” Since it says “peculiar people” in the verse, I thought that it would be fun to put it on a Peculiar PPL shirt.
Happy Birthday, Peter!
Sincerely,
Geremy
