The Years Behind a T-Shirt: Building HYPRCLOTH®

It’s easy for us to appreciate the final result of something without ever really seeing what it took to get there. We see someone “blow up overnight,” a new trend suddenly appear, or a product come out that feels completely finished, but we almost never see the years leading up to those moments. We don’t see the mistakes, the failed samples, the money spent on things that didn’t work, manufacturers disappearing, materials that were almost right, or all of the small decisions that eventually turn something into what it is today.

HYPRCLOTH® is one of those stories, and I wanted to share how we actually ended up with the fabric we use today, because I think it gives some perspective on how much work can go into something as seemingly simple as a black T-shirt.

When I first started working on Neo4ic at the end of 2019, I planned on using the same blank shirt and fabric I had used during my previous project, Damascus Apparel. I already knew the material, how it felt, how it printed, and how it held up, so while I was developing Neo4ic throughout 2019 everything looked good. Then we launched Neo4ic, opened pre-orders, and that same month the manufacturer responsible for making those blanks filed for bankruptcy.

We suddenly had hundreds of orders from customers who had taken a chance on a completely new brand, and the product I had planned on building everything around no longer existed. I drove up to Los Angeles and started looking for another supplier that could reproduce the quality we had been using. Eventually we found one, approved the samples, placed the order and received roughly 1,500 shirts. Everything looked and felt great at first, except there was one major issue: the fabric had never actually been pre-shrunk.

After fulfilling those first orders, we started realizing the shirts were shrinking significantly in the wash even though pre-shrinking had been one of our main requirements from the beginning. That was essentially version one, and versions two and three came from completely different manufacturers as we tried to fix the problems we had encountered. Every version seemed to solve one thing while creating another. One black wasn’t dark enough, another fabric was too light, another didn’t interact with our inks properly, collars would shrink or lose their shape too quickly, and sometimes a sample would be perfect only for the actual production run of hundreds of pieces to behave differently.

At a certain point we realized that if we truly wanted our own product, we couldn’t keep shopping for somebody else’s finished fabric and hoping it checked every box. We had to reach further into the supply chain and start refining the actual material ourselves, and that decision eventually brought us to Peru.

Building the Fabric

For the next evolution of HYPRCLOTH®, we began working with Peruvian Pima cotton. Pima is a premium cotton made from extra-long staple fibers, which is part of what gives it its softness and smooth feel, but softness alone wasn’t really what we were after. We wanted something that could hold its structure, survive repeated wear, stretch without becoming sloppy, and still have enough substance to work with the type of garments and printing Neo4ic is known for.

We eventually developed the fabric around a 95% Pima cotton and 5% spandex composition, and that 5% is actually a core part of what makes the material feel the way it does. The spandex gives HYPRCLOTH® a light stretch and recovery, so the fabric can move with you but still wants to return to its original form. It helps the shirt maintain its silhouette over time and gives it a different feeling on the body than a traditional 100% cotton blank. It just feels more elevated.

From there, there are still several other steps that have a big impact on the final material. We sulfur dye the fabric to achieve the extremely dark black that has become part of HYPRCLOTH®, and after dyeing it goes through enzyme washing and a pre-shrinking process. Enzyme washing uses cellulase enzymes to break down and remove tiny loose fibers from the surface of the cotton, which softens the material and helps clean up the surface of the fabric. Combined with pre-shrinking, we end up with a fabric that feels soft from the beginning, has a little bit of stretch, holds its shape and stays extremely dark black.

When you reduce everything down to that description it sounds pretty simple. Making all of those characteristics exist together consistently was the hard part.

Comfort, Functionality and Style

When I think about fashion and product design, there are three main categories I tend to look at: style, functionality and comfort. Obviously we would all love to create something that is perfect in all three, but in reality I think you can only push so hard in every direction before one begins taking away from another. Every design decision is a compromise somewhere.

A really lightweight shirt can be extremely comfortable, especially in hot weather, but it may not have enough structure to create the silhouette you want. Something that is heavily engineered around functionality can become less comfortable, and something designed almost entirely around appearance may look incredible while being annoying to actually wear. With HYPRCLOTH®, we’ve always leaned heavily into comfort and functionality while still making sure the fabric has enough structure to support the visual side of Neo4ic.

There’s also another major part of our shirts that had to be considered while developing the fabric, and that’s how we decorate them. We screen print almost everything ourselves, and Neo4ic graphics are generally not small. A lot of our artwork covers a significant portion of the shirt and can involve multiple inks, reflective inks, high-density printing, specialty effects and other techniques.

Traditional plastisol screen-printing ink is essentially a suspension of PVC resin particles in a liquid plasticizer. After being printed, the shirt travels through a conveyor dryer where the ink has to reach the proper curing temperature before it permanently sets. That creates its own set of requirements for the fabric underneath it.

Large screen prints have actual physical weight and structure. If you put a massive graphic onto a very lightweight shirt, you can begin to feel the weight of the print independently from the shirt itself. The print starts overpowering the fabric underneath it, which can make the shirt hang strangely and become uncomfortable. We needed a fabric heavy enough to support the amount of ink and decoration we regularly put onto our garments.

Our first production run of the Peruvian Pima version was around 220 GSM, and even then we ran into another problem we hadn’t anticipated. While curing the ink, we learned that the spandex inside the fabric was sensitive to excessive heat. If the shirts became too hot inside our conveyor dryers, the elastane could become damaged and weaken the structure of the cotton around it. We actually had instances where the material became so compromised that shirts could begin to disintegrate.

That was one of those problems you would never really know existed until you had already made the fabric, made the shirts, printed them and started running them through production. It also taught us that changing one characteristic of a fabric affects almost everything else. We had to understand how the cotton, spandex, GSM, dye, washing process, shrinkage, ink and curing temperatures all interacted with each other instead of treating each of those things as separate decisions.

That’s one of the reasons we eventually moved HYPRCLOTH® up to 260 GSM. GSM simply means grams per square meter and is a measurement of the weight of the fabric. For some general context, a lot of standard graphic tees and artist merchandise you buy online are somewhere around 150 to 190 GSM, so at 260 GSM there is considerably more substance to HYPRCLOTH®. That extra weight gives us a much stronger foundation for large graphics and specialty printing while creating the structured, substantial feeling we wanted the shirt itself to have.

Nine Versions Later

After years of refinement, different manufacturers, failed production runs, shrinking shirts, blacks that weren’t black enough, fabrics that were too light, fabrics that didn’t print correctly, collars that didn’t survive the way we wanted and materials that reacted unexpectedly to heat, we eventually arrived at what is now HYPRCLOTH® V9.

Today, variations of HYPRCLOTH® are used throughout our men’s graphic tees, women’s baby tees, bodysuits, sleeves, thigh highs and other products. It has become the lifeblood running through Neo4ic and makes up more than half of what the brand produces, which is kind of crazy to think about when I look back at how it started.

I think the biggest thing I want people to understand from sharing this is that sourcing and creating something custom takes an incredible amount of time. It isn’t always as simple as finding a factory online, choosing a fabric from a catalog and putting your logo on it. Once you start trying to control the exact hand feel, weight, stretch, shrinkage, color, construction and the way a material behaves during production, every variable starts affecting another variable. Sometimes the only real way to learn is to make something, find out what’s wrong with it, change it, make it again, and continue doing that until eventually there isn’t much left that you want to change.

HYPRCLOTH® has slowly become our own for that reason. Not because we invented cotton or because nobody else can make a heavyweight shirt, but because every characteristic of it has been refined around what we specifically need our products to do and how we want them to feel.

I wanted to share this story because I think the process behind a product deserves to be understood just as much as the finished product itself. There’s a belief I come back to often, that trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit, and I think HYPRCLOTH® is a really good example of that for us. It took years to arrive at V9, but looking back at what we learned along the way and what the material has become for Neo4ic, those years were worth it.