# Five shirts, five addresses

> A remote team's shirt isn't a box you distribute — it's five separate parcels arriving at five doors. That changes the design decision from "what do we print" to "what does each person get to choose".

August 17, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/remote-team-gift-shirts

An office team gets a box. Somebody opens it, calls out sizes, and hands them round. It takes
four minutes and nobody thinks about it.

A remote team doesn't have that step, and the thing that replaces it is better: five parcels, five
doorsteps, five people opening something on their own.

## What changes when there's no room to hand them out in?

The arrival becomes the event, so it's worth designing.

Nobody is going to see everyone in these shirts at once. What actually happens is five separate
small moments, probably on different days, probably photographed and posted in a channel. That's
the real form of the thing — not a group photo, a sequence of arrivals.

Which means the decisions that matter are the ones that make each parcel feel personal rather
than distributed: the colour, the size, and whether it looks like it was sent to a person or to
an employee.

## Should everyone get the same colour?

No — let people choose, and this is the cheapest upgrade available.

Same print on five different garment colours costs nothing extra when there's no minimum per
colour, and it changes the object completely. A box of identical shirts is inventory. Five
different colours with the same mark is
[a set rather than a uniform](/stories/family-reunion-shirts), and people wear those
noticeably more.

It also solves the sizing problem that used to make remote swag miserable — no guessing a
distribution, because each person's order is their own.

## What should the print be?

Something from the work, not the logo.

A remote company's shirt has an unusual property: the person wearing it is at home, alone, in
front of nobody who works there. A logo on that shirt is doing no branding at all — there's no
office to be identified in. What it can do is be a private object about a shared thing.

So the material is the same as
[an in-joke shirt](/stories/team-inside-joke-shirt): the phrase from the incident, the
mascot, the thing somebody said in a call that stuck. If the logo is wanted, small, and
[in its one-colour form](/stories/company-logo-on-a-shirt).

## Isn't this the same as a remote culture problem?

Related, and worth keeping separate.

[The culture piece](/stories/remote-team-culture) is about the fact that a distributed
company has no shared past tense, and that a series of shirts becomes its archive. That's about
what the design *means* over time.

This is the logistics half: how a single design becomes five objects in five places, and what
that does to the decisions. Different problem, same team.

## What about people in other countries?

Check where it currently ships before you build the plan around everyone getting one.

That's worth doing first rather than designing around it afterwards. Where a teammate falls
outside the delivery range, the honest options are to wait, or to ship to a colleague who can
forward it — neither is elegant, and both beat discovering it after the design is agreed.

The general shape of the problem outlasts any particular delivery map: **a distributed team's
constraint is almost never the design, it's the addresses.**

## When should they arrive?

On a date somebody picked, not whenever they happen to.

Five parcels arriving over ten days is a slow leak. Five arriving on roughly the same day is an
event — and given that made-to-order times vary by address, the way to get that is to order at
once and then say nothing until they've all landed.

The other pattern that works: send them to arrive the day before something. A launch, a call
everybody's on, an anniversary. The shirt turns up, and then there's a reason for everyone to be
wearing it at the same time on a video call, which is the closest a remote team gets to a group
photo.

## Is this worth doing for two people?

Yes, and that's the case the old economics excluded completely.

Two shirts, two addresses, two colours. It was never possible to order that before — a minimum
of seventy-two made a two-person company's shirt an absurd proposition.
[That constraint is what's actually gone](/stories/team-shirts-no-minimum), and it's why a
tiny distributed team can have a real object now.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the design at [JustOG](/) — and order one per person in the colour and size each of
them picks. Drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and each one is made to
order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

There's no box to open together. Five doorsteps is the format now.