My Polo Shirt Logo

Anyone who knows me will know that I'm a pedant - a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules - when it comes to documentation and other communicative media.

It comes from my policing and business teaching backgrounds. In policing, the letter of law is important. Teaching document production in typing, word processing and accounting classes requires attention to a high degree of accuracy too, so there's the apparent source.

How does that relate to the heading, "My Polo Shirt Logo?" Read on.

When Christina and I were in England last year, we visited a huge outlet shopping centre near Chester. Every brand imaginable had an outlet there as well as brands we hadn't heard of before. Even Tag-Heuer, one of my favourite watch brands was there. There were literally dozens of them spread over quite a few hectares.

It was a Saturday and thousands of people filled the shops, corridors and open spaces, many carrying branded bags indicating multiple purchases.

Several of the outlets were obviously selling their current fashions, not outdated products. We visited a Polo store where I looked at several lovely polo shirts. They were displaying prices of 75 and 80 British Pounds (around $130-150 AUD) which I thought was outrageous. Locals were snapping them up! 

Without exception, all the polo shirts had been made in China. Thousands of shirts bearing Chinese brands and small logos. I'd seen equally nice shirts at K Mart and Target at home.

There was no way I was going to pay $130 for a K Mart shirt with someone's brand logo displayed. You can buy the same quality shirts at K Mart for $10 AUD. Thirteen shirts for one seemed like a good trade-off.

As we drove back to our hotel at Swindon, it occurred to me that I could buy $10 K Mart shirts and steal logos from the big name brands and have them embroidered on my shirts. After all, Christina has a sewing machine that embroiders. But using someone else's logo is dishonest, so I decided I'd use my own logo. Here it is.


I've got a number of unbranded K Mart polo shirts on which I'm going to get Christina to embroider my Henry logo.

Nobody will know who the hell Henry is, but who cares? It will keep them guessing. Maybe I could start producing my own brand line of shirts at half the price of Polo, Adidas, Nike, and the rest of them. Who knows where this could lead.

Robin