Our Story
Jon, who opened the boxes.
We are a family business selling paper
That’s the honest version. Sheets of paper, printed between 1966 and 1984, that were meant to be pressed onto a t-shirt and thrown away. Nobody kept these. That was the whole point of them — you bought one, you ironed it on, the paper went in the bin.
We have 667 of them. Unused. Still exactly as they left the printer.
My daughter runs the shop day to day now. I open the boxes and work out what things are.
We were the supply behind other people’s shopfronts
What follows is my recollection. I’m telling it the way I remember it, which is the same standing I’m offering everyone else I’m asking for stories.
Before this was a website, it was a phone that rang.
Set buyers, costume designers and prop houses bought from us routinely, for decades. Film. Television. Broadway. Any production set in the sixties or seventies eventually hits the same problem: you cannot fake a period graphic. Print a modern reproduction, put it under a camera, and it looks exactly like what it is.
We had the real thing, in quantity, unused. So they came to us. Peter Jackson’s productions. Tommy Hilfiger’s people. Fred Segal. Cheap Jack’s. Seventies-theme shows that ran for years.
And the shops bought by the box. Famous vintage stores — the sort with a line outside and actors among the regulars — came to us to keep their walls stocked. Their customers thought they were buying from that store. They were buying out of these boxes.
People in the industry bought direct too. Musicians, actors, designers. We never made anything of it then and we won’t now — discretion was part of what you were paying for, and there’s no good reason to abandon it forty years later.
We were never on Melrose. We may as well have been. For a good stretch, if you needed genuine period American graphics, you ended up at our door regardless of where our door happened to be.
Here’s one we caught on camera
A customer wrote to tell us he’d spotted one of ours on That ’70s Show. We went and watched the episode to see if he was right.
He was. That’s the frame we caught.
We only have a photograph of this one because somebody happened to tell us. Most of them we never saw. Sheets went out to a production, or a store, and that was the last we knew of it — no credit, no note, nothing to keep. Somewhere in thirty years of film, television, theatre and other people’s shop walls are shirts made from these boxes that we couldn’t point to if you paid us.
Which is its own small argument for writing things down while people still remember them.
Where the idea came from
My first real education came from a man named Danny, who ran a fashion library — he rented original vintage clothing to film and television, got it back, and sent it out again. Twin Peaks wore his clothes. Plenty of the eighties wore his clothes and had no idea. He was doing that years before anyone called it archival, and he understood something most of the trade didn’t: a collection is worth more whole than broken up.
Everything we’ve done since is that idea, applied to paper instead of cloth.
Then the internet happened, and we put the store online in 1997, having sold out of a brick-and-mortar shop for years before that.
What the boxes turned out to be
For thirty years I thought I was selling nostalgia. Going through them properly, one sheet at a time, I found something else.
A printer’s entire working life. Roach Studios dated their sheets, so we can lay their years out from the objects alone — 1966 through 1984, unbroken from ’68 to ’74. Motorcycles at the start, a Corvette at the end, and in between eight Pink Panther designs, a Christmas range, and a marijuana catalogue printed by a company already called Roach.
Art history nobody remembers. Eight sheets reproduce commercial art that was already fifty years old when they were printed — Maxfield Parrish’s Daybreak, an Enoch Bolles pin-up, a turn-of-the-century seed catalogue, two railway posters. Somebody in this trade was working through a stack of pre-war advertising and putting it on t-shirts. That is not what the iron-on business is remembered for.
The licensing machine, at speed. Disney, Warner Bros, Hanna-Barbera, King Features, Lucasfilm. Star Wars opens in May 1977 and there are sheets. Battlestar Galactica premieres and there are seven designs. Mork & Mindy lands the same year and there are nine.
And the argument, not just the joke. Six sheets about women’s lives, sold because they moved, not because anyone meant them as politics — including the fish and the bicycle, twice.
We still supply the trade
Costume departments, set buyers, stylists, designers, and shops that want a wall worth looking at. We still do multi-sheet lots — fifty pieces up to two thousand — for people who need range rather than one sheet.
If you’re dressing a period production or stocking a shop and you need genuine 1960s–80s American graphics, not reproductions, write to us. We can usually work to a brief.
How we work
- Original old stock only. No reproductions, ever. Not now, not later, not if we run out.
- Once it’s gone, it’s gone. We never claim a sold-out original is coming back, because it isn’t.
- We say what we can prove. Where a sheet carries a printed date, we give the date. Where it doesn’t, we say so rather than guess.
- Sold-out pages stay up. They’re the record. Taking them down would delete the history.
- We catalogue what was printed. Some of these sheets wouldn’t be made today. They’re here as they were, without apology and without celebration. An archive that only keeps the flattering things isn’t an archive.
If you were in this trade, write to us
We can tell you what was printed. We can’t tell you how it moved — who the reps were, what a shop paid, why a store carried Roach and not Holoubek, how a boutique ended up with a Disney licence on the wall.
That’s in people’s heads, and those people are getting older.
If you sold this stuff, printed it, repped it, ran a heat press in a mall in 1978 — or if you bought from us for a production or a shop and remember what it was for — irononstation@gmail.com. Also looking for dated Roach sheets from 1975, 1977, 1979 or 1981–83, which are the documented gaps in the timeline.
We’ll say plainly what’s documented and what’s recollection. Both are worth having. They’re not the same thing.
The original page, kept as written
This is how this page read for years — written before AI, before Google worked the way it does now, back when you shouted a bit to be heard. We’re leaving it up. It’s a relic too.
AMAZING Vintage t-shirt iron-on "warehouse" find in Seattle
www.irononstation.com
Imagine going back in a TIME MACHINE to 1973 and being able to get ANY ROCK BAND, ANY TV SHOW, ANY HIT MOVIE, put onto a T-shirt for you, on the spot.
All over America in the 1970s there were small t-shirt shops who would offer a full selection of t-shirt iron-on transfers. You could go in, point to a picture you wanted for your shirt, pick your shirt size and color, and in 5 minutes you would have a ONE OF A KIND unique 1970s T shirt.
The Beatles, Harley and Hot Rods, KISS, James Dean, ET, Rocky, even ELVIS, the KING.
Well the TIME MACHINE has just been discovered and a very lucky guy in Seattle has come up with boxes full of NEW OLD STOCK, DEADSTOCK, T SHIRT IRON ON TRANSFERS FROM THE 1970s.
Still in original unused MINT condition.
It's not just ROCK, but TV SHOWS, MOVIE STARS, MUSCLE CARS, MOTORCYCLES, BOOZE, 420, EVEN SEXY, RAUNCHY and FUNNY ONES too. After all the 1970s was about SEX, DRUGS, & ROCK AND ROLL.
SO here it is, a collection just like it was left for us half a century ago. They are a trustworthy small business that is sharing their lucky find with YOU THE HUNTER of quality authentic American fashion, Original old stock Pop Culture from the 60s, 70s and early 80s.
Some of these are genuinely rare and go fast. The original find ran to more than 1,200 titles — about half of those sold through our brick-and-mortar years and never made it onto the website. Remember, ONCE they are gone...THEY ARE GONE - FOREVER (no reproductions, no remakes, all original stock)
- We are happy to share these rare american fashion relics as a hobby, small business.
- We're in the Western USA (all products are Made in USA, authentic, and 40 to 60 years old)
- Been online since 1997 and in brick and mortar business since long before then
- We love the vintage goodness, it's super fun for us and hope you enjoy it too
- Please SHARE with your friends for a 10% discount using code: L8C0IDHLZTGD (they will thank you!)