Vintage Tom Cat Brand Oranges T-Shirt 90s

For about seventy years, the end of a wooden orange crate was some of the most valuable advertising space in California. When growers started shipping fruit east on the Southern Pacific in the mid-1880s, packers stamped a simple mark on each crate so buyers could recognize a brand and order it again. Competition turned the stamp into art. Full-color lithographed labels appeared in the 1880s, mostly drawn by anonymous staff artists at the lithograph houses. Each one was trying to make a single brand stand out in a rail yard full of identical boxes.

Early labels leaned on orchards and mountain scenery. Later ones went bolder: big brand names, block letters, simple shapes, anything that read from across a warehouse. Then, in the early 1950s, the industry decided wooden crates cost too much to ship and switched to cardboard boxes. Label printing stopped, and an estimated ninety percent of the unused labels were destroyed. Collectors didn’t start digging the survivors out of printers’ archives and packing sheds until the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This shirt carries a crate label at full size. TOM CAT Brand is lettered in blue and red on yellow. A black-and-white cat with green eyes stretches out on a red cushion, a DELICIOUS ORANGES sunburst sits in the corner, and “Grown and Packed by O.K. Fruit Exchange, Pasadena, California” runs along the bottom.

The end of an orange crate, worn on the front of a shirt.