tshirtOS 2.0 for Ballentine’s
Challenge: Invent and produce 25-30 washable, programmable, instantly customizable t-shirts for Ballantine’s Scotch Whiskey marketing campaign.
The Work: We built and managed a cross-disciplinary team to prototype and produce a wearable garment with advanced e-textile materials, hardware, and software application. This included UX and fashion research and design, innovating new processes, quality control and analysis of the product in real-world environments, and hardware to software development and integration.
Results: The result is the first ever washable wearable display innovated and produced in less than 9 months. The shirts were delivered to 15 different countries around the world as part of a promotional campaign. The tshirtOS Android software allowed the customer to change the text, animation, or design of the shirt on demand.
It received the Techtextile awarded for innovation, critical acclaim at SXSW and millions of worldwide impressions. Over 17,000 people signed up for the shirts with 1.6 Million Views on YouTube. The shirts continue to claim attention for the brand years later as one of the most innovative products developed.
tshirtOS for Ballantine's is soft and feels amazing on the body. It is hand washable, foldable, digitally controlled, and made with an advanced electronic thread.
What makes up a digital tee shirt?
Why would anyone want to wear one? What are the key features and expectations?
While working on tshirtOS for Ballantine's and researching new wearable digital displays, we did a survey of over 150 people to find out the answers.
Click on the images or here to see the results!
HIGHLIGHTS from our conversations from the survey are:
At first glance most people had expectations of high resolution imagery (1024 +), but were fine with lower resolution if the experience and pitch of the LEDs looked satisfactory.
Having the ability to add text on the fly was the most desirable feature ask.
Most people use an Apple mobile device.
Coloured text and images did not make it to the desirable feature ask. Black and White are satisfactory for the majority.
Washability is an expected necessity, though customers are open to a removable panel as a washable option.
Places people want to wear the shirts varied widely from sporting events, to night time runs, to PR events, to electronic music festivals, to general social gatherings.
The concept of changing the image anytime you want via a mobile application was a highly unexpected surprise. Most thought the image was static.
The ratio of female and male customers is 60/40, much higher than we anticipated.
Follow @SwitchEmbassy on Instagram to see behind the scenes videos and pictures of the making of tshirtOS 2.0.
