In tenth grade, Dan Lachman came up with some ideas for clever t-shirts, but he didn’t know how to draw. He put the ideas in the back of his head and went about the business of being a teenager. Lachman, now 20 and a sophomore at Weslyan University, has found a way to make his designs come to life, or cotton rather.

This past summer, the Bethesda resident started his own line of T-shirts called Sharpshirter (www.sharpshirter.com) instead.
“I’ve had a few nine-to-five jobs, and I wanted to do something more creative and that had a finished product to show off,” said Lachman, who came up with the idea of starting his own business because he was having trouble finding t-shirts that he liked. “I was getting sick of looking for t-shirts. It’s really easy for girls, because there are tons of cutesy shirts, but there aren’t many options for guys.”

Lachman found lately that even stores with a DIY culture like Threadless have progressively become more akin to “cutesy” designs, lately flooding their catalog with monkeys, smirking zombies and bears. He hopes to give the guys some alternatives to cutesy, with what he calls “visual puns.”

At first, Lachman tried to get other t-shirt lines to pick up his design ideas. Having no luck with that, he started hunting down artists online. He posted ads on craigslist and recruited artists who had submitted designs in Threadless contests, and finally teamed up with designer Stefanie Gafke. Together they started creating a few shirts that make up the current line on Sharpshirter.

It’s fair to say the pithy T-shirt market has been saturated, and it might be hard for someone like Lachman to break into the market, but in two month’s Sharpshirter has sold more than 200 t-shirts and found its way onto MTV. Kim Stulz from America’s Next Top Model wore the “Plane Tree” design, one of Lachman’s favorites, on The “Freshman.”

The next round of designs on Sharpshirter, sometime next year, will include a line for women. Lachman’s got a few ideas brewing in his head, and the entrepreneur is actively trying to get retail stores to carry the brand.

“Some guy in California wants to buy 300 shirts for his shop,” said Lachman.
Meaning, get your Sharpshirter shirt while they’re underground.