Boomerang: the oversized staff tee that had to survive a kitchen

Boomerang sells chicken burgers, sandos and loaded fries out of a growing set of Lahore outlets — Gulberg, DHA, Johar Town, the Falcon complex — under a bubble-lettered wordmark in pink on purple. The brand is built for the phone: every wall, box and delivery bag is designed to be photographed, and the staff are part of the picture. So the staff uniform was never going to be a plain polo with a logo. It had to be a piece of the brand that a team member would wear on shift and a customer would want to buy.

They sent a mockup, and it was a good one: an oversized drop-shoulder tee in deep purple, a small pink wordmark on the chest, and on the back a pink glaze shape spilling across the whole panel and over the sleeves with 'Behind the Glaze Craze' set inside it. Alongside it, a purple bucket hat with a cluster of enamel-style badges — 'Sando', 'Burger', 'Bite Club', 'Not Sharing', the boomerang mark.

The specification that came with the mockup was cotton jersey, screen printed. It is the specification most people reach for when they order custom t-shirts, and for a chest logo it would have been right.

The back design covers most of the back panel and wraps onto both sleeves. Screen printing that on cotton means laying a large, continuous area of plastisol ink over the fabric — a layer that does not breathe, sits heavy, and on a garment cut this oversized becomes a plastic sheet across the shoulders. Boomerang's team wears this in kitchens and behind counters in Lahore heat, for whole shifts. A tee like that would have been sweated through by the first rush and cracking at the print edges within a season of hot washes.

So we proposed a different construction: all-over sublimation printing on polyester mesh. Sublimation dyes the fibre rather than coating it — there is nothing on the surface to crack, peel or trap heat — and a mesh knit breathes in a way heavyweight cotton cannot. The print runs edge to edge because the panels are printed before the garment is cut and sewn, so the glaze shape crosses the shoulder seams and continues down the sleeves exactly as drawn. The garment comes out wrinkle-free, washes like an undecorated shirt, and the colour is as bright after a hundred washes as on day one. Same oversized fit, same purple, same design. A different garment underneath it.

The mockup's badges were drawn as enamel pins. They were made as embroidered patches instead — a satin-stitched border, dense fill in pink and white on purple, the wordmark's wobble kept intact in thread — which sit flat, survive the wash and cannot bend or fall off in a kitchen. The seven patches sit on the purple bucket hat in the same arrangement as the mockup. Custom caps and bucket hats with embroidered patches are made in the same unit as the tees, so the two arrived together.

The tee and the hat are worn by the team across Boomerang's outlets and they turn up in the brand's own photography — the same pieces on the same people, in front of the signage, at the counter, at the 'go boom' wall. That is the test a staff garment either passes or fails: whether the brand puts it in the picture. Because the print is in the fibre, it will look like this for the life of the garment.

It is also the reason we push back on a specification when the garment is going to be worn hard. Boomerang asked for cotton and screen print because that is what a tee usually is. What they needed was a garment that could carry a design that big through a shift in a kitchen — and that is a fabric and method decision before it is a design one.

Photographs and the film are Boomerang's own, from their outlets and their social channels.