The Story of Y Tease
It was 2014, and after traveling to twenty countries and living in five, I was sitting at my computer in Ho Chi Minh City and realized that my wandering was coming to an end. It was time to hang up my rucksack and make the move back to Canada.
My girlfriend at the time - the lady who is now my wife - has a name with the letter Y as a word within it. Her name was in my mind because we had both been working on her application for a visa to Canada with her name on it and the Y struck me. I found myself contemplating “Y” any of the last ten years had happened… and “Y” we were now both moving back to Canada.
I had been scrolling through a lot of quick reads as I was thinking about all of this, and I read an article on Veronica Foster. I learned that she had been a Canadian icon during World War Two: she represented the war effort being made by females all across Canada. In fact, Veronica’s fame came before that of Rosie the Riveter in the USA. And it has been thought that Veronica was the inspiration for the Rosie advertising campaign in the United states.
A few days later I was sitting at my computer again and was looking at a Rosie the Riveter T-shirt and thought: I am looking at a women flexing her arm to show the power and strength of women, and the particular strength they demonstrated during World War Two. So the idea Arm+Y was born. For the next ten years (it’s funny how fast time goes) from time to time I would think of different words ending in Y and think about their connections to culture and life.
Fast forward now to 2025. I have a little bit of extra time on my hands, so I decided it’s now or never to start my Y Tease T-shirt company.
I want to make something I can be proud of. Since I have some experience with fair-trade products, I knew I wanted my T-shirts to be fair-trade. So after spending time sourcing T shirts I found Green Campus Co-op. Green Campus Co-op was started by York University and is run by students and faculty at York. Their shirts are made under fair-trade in India, by Assisi Garments. Assisi is a social-purpose enterprise run by Franciscan Nuns. I believe this is a deserving company because under fair-trade, wages and work environment are regulated: people are treated with dignity, and they are paid properly.
I breathed a sigh of relief. I had found a cool T-Shirt distributer! Now for hang tags. Green Campus shirts come with hang tags. Y Tease shirts need hang tags as well. So after more sourcing, I found Zo Project out of Vietnam that keeps a traditional hand-made paper craft alive by employing rural people with fair employment. I feel these hang tags are consistent with the Y Tease brand. The Vietnamese supplier is another socially responsible company. And our hang tags are fashioned from hand-made paper.
As far as printing I found a great printer, Corey at Custom T Shirts Ottawa .
As I’m always a bit unsure when writing things, my grade-nine English teacher has joined the team to make sure periods are where they are supposed to be.
And that is the Y Tease story.
- Dana