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.
I’m writing this on the 13th of November 2023. I’d like to try to provide sort of a visage of Get Some Sleep as an operation today. This will be a play by play style introduction to what a work day looks like from my perspective. I’m going to aim to personify the people who run the brand every day as well as show you an intimate look into the process here of how things get done. Work days at the warehouse are colored by random food, drinking coffee, and listening to various youtube videos on the TV.
It’s 1:11 PM right now, Jossue and I just got to the warehouse. I picked him up from his house a bit ago, finding him waiting with a thermos full of his lunch. Jossue is responsible for a lot of operations of the brand including shipping and manpower. He makes products, works on bulk orders, and as of right now is loading files into the vinyl cutter. We’re looking for 24 inch files of “Everyone I Love is Here”- getting things set up. Today we’ll use them for a project but I’ll get to that later. Right now is just the start of a long work today.
(Dylan and Jossue at work later in the day )
I’m grabbing coffee and loading up a youtube video mix of music. Here’s the link for those interested (it’s good.)
Dylan is presently on the way from LA. He’s up there picking up blanks to be used for the prints today— reflective tees. I’ll add more details in the next update.
1:56 PM. With Dylan en route, Jossue has begun to individually peel each vinyl from their sheets. This is the second step in the creation process. After the vinyl is cut, the letters need to be separated out individually on the vinyl sticker sheets. This is a detailed and laborious process. We threw on a new music video too. We’re listening to “Everywhere at the End of Time” - The Caretaker. Here’s how Jossue describes it, “It’s portraying a progression of Alzheimer's disease- it starts off clear but distorted. You can tell by the rhythm of the music. There’s something up with it though- like a worn out recording. You’ll hear more about the white noise as it goes on- eventually the album ends with emptiness, nothing really playing. Music might be scarcely in there somewhere, but its all gone by the final phase.” The album is around 6 hours long. Who knows if we’ll make it all the way through today. We’ve been going strong at it for about 30 minutes so far and I’m really digging it. Check it out if you’re into experimental sort of things. I’m not sure if it’s common knowledge but I’d never heard of it.
2:48PM Daniel and Dylan have just arrived with burgers from The Window. It’s a fantastic restaurant with cheap burgers and vegan options. They’re amazing, but the Venice Beach location burned down, so now we have to get them an hour away in Silverlake.
We ate and then all got to work immediately peeling vinyl letters. There’s a ton to do so we’re trying to get through them as quickly as possible. Daniel primed the heat press and we’re getting ready to start applying to the hoodies.
4:45PM After about two hours, we’ve been able to get through making about half of the hoodies. Jossue is running the heat press, Daniel and I are peeling vinyl, and Dylan is working on applying it to hoodies. Here’s Jossue’s explanation on using the press for any curious readers, “First I put the vinyl onto the sweaters by measuring from the ‘I’ in “I hope I don’t feel like this forever”. The top of the ‘I’ is about three inches and I measure from the neck opening on the hoodie. Next I load the hoodie into the heat press, cook it at 330 degrees on an 8 pressure level for 15 seconds. Once its done I take the arms of the hoodie and rub the vinyl so the fabric absorbs some head from the vinyl. After it cools a bit I peel the vinyl backing off.” We got through a ton of them today but not quite all.
DAY 2 - Wednesday
Today I pulled up to the shop around 1PM. Everyone was already here getting to work. We packed up some boxes of hoodies and took them to the printer down the street. Its raining devilishly today but Dylan braved the storm to take some other hoodies to be embroidered.
We’re picking back up on heat pressing 80 more hoodies today. Marlon, our friend and photographer will be here in a few minutes to help shoot photos and video. Right now, an interview with Kenny beats and Rick Ruben is playing while we work. I hope its fun to hear the kind of stuff we have playing while working and humanizes the hoodies you all receive a little bit. Each made to order item is crafted with love by our team in the shop every day.
Some of the vinyls were messed up and printed backwards so we’re going to recut and re-peel them. It’s not a huge setback, but just a little quirk of the process of making these.
Here's an outline for the whole week from Daniel: “We’ve got to finish IHID hoodies (need to make today) , memories hoodies (being embroidered), frog shirts are getting here tomorrow and need to be shipped, working on fixing some stuff a manufacturer messed up, and we’re getting to the bears. Also working on getting tracking updated for the zippy’s as soon as possible.”
Tomorrow will be a huge day of shipping the frog tees and getting everything out for the week. It will be a huge day for the brand in terms of work- really all hands on deck.
I posted a few tiktoks on the Get Some Sleep brand account that you can check out to get a more visual representation of everything I talked about. I’m going to start posting more on there especially in January. Its going to be a good accompaniment to the blog and interesting lens through which to check out all the behind the scenes of the brand.
Thanks everyone for reading the blog this week! Be sure to enter the November writing contest if you haven't already! We're giving away a ton of store credit so check it out. See you next week!