The Tee Shop is the department of the Lake Shop that creates merchandise for the student body and the staff. The Tee Shop originates from about four years ago and right now, consists of three staff members.

The design ideas and creation of the tee shirts are left in the hands of staff members.

“That’s [who come up with the designs] usually the people who work in the tee shop, so that’s me and my two other guys that are working with me right now,” staff member Aiden Pina said. “We came up with some new merchandise designs. So, next year whoever does tee shop… will be making the designs.”

At the tee shop, to keep things running smoothly, each person has a different job.

“We have people who specifically work on designing, people who specifically work one emailing the orders out, and people who also specifically just press the t-shirts, but we do rotate between jobs,” Pina said.

In order to make the merchandise sold, a lot of time and effort is put into the creation process.

“It’s (creating tee shirts) a little long, I’m not going to lie, it takes about two to three weeks to get a final product out, but the actual making it part isn’t hard at all,” Pina said. “Just put the tee shirt on the heat press, you press down the design you want to press and then it’s good to go.”

This year the tee shop came up with and created new merchandise such as sweats to add to their clothing collection.

“This year we’ve had a big opening in our inventory, so we are able to include things like sweats and different jackets and stuff like that,” Pina said. “My teacher was like well, we should try sweatpants, and I was like you know what that would be a good idea because there’s a lot of kids who wear sweatpants and so that’s how we decided.”

While sweats are the latest thing to be added to the tee shop, it might not be the last.

“I think a custom tee shirt order form would be nice for students themselves to come in and be like, I would like this on a tee shirt and then we’d be able to create it that way inside the shop, but you know that’s a little in the future,” Pina said.

The Tee Shop also provides students with a chance to allow their creativity to flow, for this reason, staff member Matteo Moreno decided to join.

“It looked like it could bring out my creative side of things and just have a chance at something new because I’d never done something like that before,” Moreno said.

While staff enjoy working at the tee shop, it can be stressful at times.

“It’s a little under pressure but at the end of the day it’s fun; you know, you learn a lot,” Moreno said.

Moreno’s advice to anyone interested in the tee shop, is to have fun and work hard.

“Just be relaxed have a good time and just make sure you’re on top of things and try as hard as you can not to mess up,” Moreno said.

The Tee Shop has worked hard this year and will continue to resume the work in the semester to come.