If you’re a gamer that likes to wear clothes, then you’ll like purveyors of quality gaming attire Casually Hardcore. Website owner Marc let us bend his ear for a while to talk about his booming business.
Games Asylum: How long has the site been running for?
Casually Hardcore: The site has been running for nearly three years. In that time we’ve brought on multiple partner stores for other gaming sites and pod-casts such as This is Joypod. We introduced a range of video game inspired posters to brighten up any gaming room and managed to offer our gamer shirts from $15/£11.
We started out with only a handful of designs and have now grown to over 80. We’re also ready to launch our new range of Urban Gamer shirts in the next few weeks – you’ll find further details on the site.
GA: What are the most popular shirts?
CH: Our Alan Wake shirts are currently doing well thanks to the game’s release a couple of weeks back but our biggest sellers are either game based slogans such as ‘I don’t need to get a life, I’m a gamer I have lots of lives’ or our graphic based designs that subtly reference a game without it being geeky or obvious. Our zombie shirts have a huge following too!
GA: How long does it take to design a shirt?
CH: We listen to what our customers want as well as make designs for ourselves. Sometimes a customer will have a gaming slogan that we think works well. These can take a very short time to design. Other designs can take days as we tweak the design to perfection; these are generally our more subtle designs. We are constantly looking for feedback before and after a design goes live to make sure we create the type of stuff we and our customers want. We also have commissions from other artists too who put in a number of hours as well.
GA: Any strange requests?
CH: Some of our design ideas have come through seeing what keywords people type in to find our site. This is where our ‘I only Date Gamers’ shirt design came from. But generally we don’t get strange requests, most are obvious design ideas from fans of certain games so we feel our ideas match their expectations. But please feel free to request designs on our site!
GA: If you could have a celebrity model your shirts on your site, which would you choose?
CH: That’s a tough one. We’ve had our shirts worn by Ryan Scott of The GeekBox/1UP fame, Jeff Cannata from The Totally Rad Show/Weekend Confirmed and we’ve even sent some to Charlie Brooker. But I think we’d need a well known gamer to wear our stuff and I feel Cliff Bleszinski has the right look to model some of our gamer shirts. But if you feel you have what it takes to model out shirts let us know.
GA: And finally, have you ever had to send a small size shirt to America?!
CH: You’ll be surprised at some of the stuff we send. Our Achievement Unlocked / Locked girl’s thongs sell well and yes we have sent a number of small shirts to America. We’ve found a lot of girl gamers order our shirts in small women’s sizes and their boyfriends are not the stereotypical fat American male nerd, as they tend to order in mediums or large. Although we do sell our shirts up to 4XXL as we feel everyone should have the choice to wear our designs. That’s why we have such a large women’s section for the often ignored girl gamers.