Inside jokes and funny sayings are lost the minute they’re uttered, but Joe Taylor, owner of Toronto Tees, can immortalize those words forever on a T-shirt. He specializes in custom-designed shirts that can feature just about anything, with one exception. “We have a really strict copyright policy here,” he says, “and people come in here all the time and they want us to print a Superman shirt or something like that, and unfortunately [we won't].” But Joe is quick to point out that there’s always a middle ground where customers can be happy, whether it’s printing their favourite dialogue from a TV show or tweaking the design of a logo so it doesn’t infringe on copyright laws. “We do our best to help people out,” he adds. “We try to accommodate people.”
Aside from wanting Angry Bird or the Batman logo on a custom-printed shirt, Joe is more than happy to print whatever a client would like. He says that every day, customers come up with several funny ideas that validate why he got into Toronto Tees in the first place. One such memorable tee was for a man whose wife was pregnant with twins, so Joe printed him a shirt with two ultrasound images and the words “Real men make twins.”
