In 1964, he opened a tiny shop in the Waikīkī bazaar known as the International Market Place. In 1962, after another summer on Santa Catalina Island and two years studying automotive design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, Ralston took his summer business to the sidewalks of Waikīkī in Oahu, Hawaii, where the summer’s tourism season provided him with sustainable income. Tourists had to bring their own blank T-shirts from a local sporting goods shop, and Ralston and “Crazy Arab” embellished them with depictions of monsters, surfers or hot rods at $2.80 a piece, sometimes making as much as $100 a day. In 1960, Ralston and friends set up a shop on the sidewalk of Santa Catalina Island. Rick Ralston made the decision right then and there to go into the T-shirt business. Rick Ralston had been designing his towel on a worn out T-shirt, which he then referred to as "an ugly monster shape." One day, while wearing it down the street, a tourist offered to buy the shirt off of his back for their daughter. Ralston took this idea and traveled to Santa Catalina Island with a friend, referred to as “Crazy Arab” to spray-paint designs on beach towels. Reporter Sharon Nelton of BNET titled Ralston as “the T-shirt king of America and the father of the modern T-shirt.” In the summer of 1960, as a teenager just out of high school in Montebello, California, Ralston spray-painted a design on a T-shirt. Crazy Shirts houses the largest printing facility in Hawaiʻi, on the island of Oʻahu, and employs more than 400 employees.įrederick Carleton “Rick” Ralston is associated with transforming T-shirts from underwear into outerwear. The company operates 35 retail stores in Hawaii, California, Florida, Nevada, and Colorado. Crazy Shirts is an American T-shirt and clothing company established in 1964 and based in Honolulu, Hawaii.
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