Making the Mystery Trading Tees

Hey everyone! I'm Grant, an LA based writer/artist and long time friend of GSS. Welcome to the start of a new blog series for the website that will be published in addition to the Love Letter every week. Get Some Sleep is so important to me, and I'm excited to share the brand's past, present, and future evolution with all of you here. We'll be going through the daily minutia and interesting projects that happen every day in the operation of the brand.

Mystery trading tees have defined the whole week here, so I’m going to be giving a little rundown of how they work! I’ll also be walking you through the process of how the first edition run came to be in a single day at the warehouse. Strap in!

Inspired by Pokemon cards and CSGO cases, the mystery trading tees are entirely random and probability based. As shown in the pictures, each tee has a certain probability of being pulled per order.

Monday’s drop was a limited first edition printing of 100 total shirts. They are tagged as such with a first edition indication on the label and made in house. Today we’re dropping be an ‘unlimited’ print, meaning stock is unlimited although the probabilities of each tee will be the same. The Manta-ray and Longest Night tees are both reflective holographic print as well as the rarest. There will be a channel on the discord for people to trade tees if they’d like. The designs are exclusive to the set and won't be printed again outside of the release.

The idea behind these tees is to give people a chance to get a random design, create some rarer GSS items, and provide a platform to release lots of different types of work at once. The first edition drop was completely free, while the Black Friday release will be unlimited until the preorder period ends.

Here’s a breakdown of the different designs and rarities:

Getting these made was an all day affair. I’ll walk you through the process from start to finish. I got to the warehouse around 2PM at which point Daniel had already printed the size tags for the whole run of 100 tees. It took a bit to figure out the sizing to ensure a perfect distribution according to the probabilities we set. Eventually, with some help from chat gpt and Dylan’s Excel skills we got it all down.

Right now, the screen printing apparatus is only set up for one head of printing at a time. That means each design needs to be done one by one. We started on the prints pretty much right away, and as each size run of shirts was pushed through the oven, I began organizing them out by size. This process sounds straight forward but it took the better part of a few hours.

The next step was getting the ‘packs’ printed. They’re made of brown paper bag type material and fit a single tee perfectly. Each ‘pack’ is labeled only by size, so the actual shirt is a complete mystery. Since these are first edition and technically a total first try at this idea, there is some slight nuance in the prints as well as bags. 

The next step was applying the holographic vinyl to each of the special insert tees. Some of the manta ray tees have this feature, but they’re rarer than the standard version. The placements are random so each holo tee is also 1/1. I placed all of them so I hope you enjoy the little designs :) Each of the shirts we bagged individually and shuffled a multitude of times so they’re truly random. I made some tiktoks about this whole process which I’ll link so you can check out more about how this all went down.

We’re hoping you all really enjoy the tees and curious if some people will even decide to keep their ‘packs’ sealed? We’ll also have a discord channel for anyone that wants to trade tees or complete an entire collection of each design. Drop a comment with your plans for the tees down below the post. Hope you enjoyed a bunch of pictures as well that show a more in depth look at the process :)

Thanks so much for reading this week! Any feedback on the mystery trading tees is greatly appreciated as well. See you next time!