Crazy Shirts

Frederick Carleton “Rick” Ralston is associated with transforming T-shirts from underwear into outerwear. Reporter Sharon Nelton of BNET titled Ralston as “the T-shirt king of America and the father of the modern T-shirt.” In the summer of 1960, as a teenager just out of high school in Montebello, California, Ralston spray-painted a design on a T-shirt. Ralston took this idea and traveled to Santa Catalina Island with a friend, referred to as “Crazy Arab” to spray-paint designs on beach towels.

Rick Ralston had been designing his towel on a worn out T-shirt, which he then referred to as "an ugly monster shape." One day, while wearing it down the street, a tourist offered to buy the shirt off of his back for their daughter. Rick Ralston made the decision right then and there to go into the T-shirt business.

In 1960, Ralston and friends set up a shop on the sidewalk of Santa Catalina Island. Tourists had to bring their own blank T-shirts from a local sporting goods shop, and Ralston and “Crazy Arab” embellished them with depictions of monsters, surfers or hot rods at $2.80 a piece, sometimes making as much as $100 a day.

In 1962, after another summer on Santa Catalina Island and two years studying automotive design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, Ralston took his summer business to the sidewalks of Waikīkī in Oahu, Hawaii, where the summer’s tourism season provided him with sustainable income.

In 1964, he opened a tiny shop in the Waikīkī bazaar known as the International Market Place. The shop was called Ricky’s Crazy Shirts, and, to Ralston’s knowledge, it was the first store ever devoted exclusively to T-shirts and sweatshirts. Due to the popularity of the T-shirt designs among tourists, Ralston needed to increase production speed, and he turned from spray-painting to screen-printing the designs. Later that year, Ralston changed the shop’s name from Ricky’s Crazy Shirts to Crazy Shirts. In 1970, Ralston opened a second shop in Honolulu’s Ala Moana shopping center. The company’s sales at that time were about $500,000.

Crazy Shirts expanded during the 1990s with more than 70 stores across the U.S., but in September 2001, the company closed four stores and filed for bankruptcy. In November 2001, Only The Best Inc., a company affiliated with the owners of Waikiki Trader Corp, bought the company.