Goodwear USA had been in business near twenty years when Founder and CEO Stephen Liquori got one of the oddest requests for a special order. “I got a phone call one morning from a guy who said, ‘I need a size 10X t-shirt.’”
“I’d been in the business a long time and I thought, ‘Well this is maybe one of my friends calling me to tease me a little bit,’ but I asked him, ‘Well, exactly how big is a 10X t-shirt.’ And he said, without skipping a beat, ‘Five by seven.’ Five feet by seven feet… ‘What is this for?’ He said, ‘Well, we have this display we set up in Virginia for the guys that are going overseas… We make this gigantic t-shirt and we pin it to a board and all the friends and families write little messages to the people on the ship. And then it gets flown over, put on the ship and then they unravel it and can read all the messages from their loved ones.’”
“So I said, ‘Okay, interesting idea.’ I talked to the factory and we took our largest 30 inch tubular fabric, opened it up so it was five feet, and they cut and sewed and made the t-shirt… We made it in Pennsylvania, so it was domestically made, which was an important piece of it.”
The USS Theodore Roosevelt had set sail on September 19, 2001, just eight days after the attack on the World Trade Center. The ship’s tour was part of Operation Enduring Freedom and the start of the US war on terrorism in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The t-shirt was one way people were able to send an uplifting message to the men and women on the ship.
Steve received some photos of the shirt after it had been presented. “And several months later, there it was, pinned on a board with people signing it. And the next photo was it on the actual carrier with the shirt rolled out and people reading all the messages… It was a cool project.”
