Remember the famous Gaffney’s Sporting Goods Tent Sales and T shirts?

Posted February 16, 2023 in Blog

Did you know that STL Shirt Co was once a sporting goods store before we only sold shirts? That’s right, Gaffneys Sporting Goods was the place. And those who remember Gaffney’s definitely remember the famous Gaffney’s T shirts and Gaffney’s Tent Sales! Someone asked us the other day how the Gaffney’s T and tent sale came to be and we figured it’d be worth writing about. Origin story begin:

On a Saturday in July 1981 Mike & Jim put 4 tables full of shoes and Adidas T-shirts etc out on the front sidewalk at the first store next to MBM BBQ and Gene’s Place in Florissant MO.
It was the biggest sale date in company history at that time. A whopping 1002.00. At the end of the day we sold some Gaffney’s T shirts for $2.00 each to break the $1000 goal we wanted to reach. That’s when the 2.00 Gaffney’s T-Shirt was born.

That very night the store was broken into and all of the money and about half of all the inventory in the entire store was stolen. That was not very nice. It darn near put Gaffney’s out of business.

We continued to have sidewalk sales, but the most popular items were the $2.00 T-Shirts.

Fast forward- Adidas, Puma, Umbro, Nike, and Lotto shorts were the most popular shorts in the World.
We would order 2000 pairs of shorts in assorted colors and matching t shirts to go with the shorts. The shorts would come in but the t shirts would never come in because they could not get them printed in time to arrive with the shorts.
So we started screenprinting the Gaffney’s logo ourselves in all the colors that matched the Shorts.

Thanks to the AWESOME support of customers at the Florissant Gaffney’s, we learned how to screenprint ourselves.

So now you know.

So if you want to go Back and we mean WAY BACK, you can order a Gaffney’s T-Shirt and have it shipped directly to you. We had to adjust the price from 40 years ago to 8.95 plus shipping