Many companies offer Casual Fridays to their employees. On Casual Friday, the dress code is much less strict. You can wear jeans, for example, or maybe shorts, instead of your usual slacks or skirt and collared, button-down shirt or blouse. Some offices might allow open-toed shoes on Casual Friday. Some might limit the casual day to khakis or sneakers. At most offices, though, Casual Friday will allow you to wear a t-shirt on that one day of the week. Wouldn’t it be fun to get some custom t-shirts made just for the office?
If you’re looking for simplicity in your wardrobe and don’t mind doing laundry once a week, you could just make one Casual Friday t-shirt for yourself. It could say TGIF, for “Thank Goodness It’s Friday,” or maybe “Counting the Minutes Till 5pm.”
If you’d like to make more than one t-shirt, the options are endless. You could include a joke about Casual Friday, like, “I work so many hours that this stupid t-shirt is the only thing I own that’s not a suit.” You could boast about your weekend plans with logos like “Goin’ Fishin’,” or “My other t-shirt is a sailboat.” Your t-shirt doesn’t have to be about Casual Friday, or even about the weekend. If you don’t want to cause a stir, you could just design a t-shirt with your office logo on it, and maybe your name on the back.
You can also get together with some coworkers to brainstorm ideas for Casual Friday t-shirts. You can get new ones every couple months or so, perhaps. Or, you could make t-shirts for each other, with the slogans or logos being a surprise.
If you are an employer who wants to put Casual Fridays into effect, maybe you are worried about enforcing the more casual dress code. There are still rules, after all, like no open-toed shoes, perhaps, or no sweatpants. Sometimes, though, it is more of a challenge for employees to respect the dress code when it is Casual Friday. Many times, once the rules are stretched a little bit, the entire dress code goes out the window completely. One option for preventing this kind of thing without being a “mean boss” might be to have t-shirts made for your employees for Casual Friday. Making the dress code for Casual Friday simple but specific might seem lame, but it actually takes the pressure off of people the same way a less strict dress code does. If you know that when you wake up on Friday morning you can just throw on your jeans and company t-shirt, you have much less to worry about than if you had to put a whole suit or dressier outfit together. So matching t-shirts would still be a break—and don’t forget, everyone loves getting free stuff!
Whether you’re making t-shirts just for yourself or for the whole department, consider custom design for Casual Fridays. You can bring some creativity and humor into the end of the week, for a price that won’t break the budget.