News

Where oh where has the time gone! Urban Pirate has reached a decade!  We can’t believe it. Ten years down the line and our mission has never changed, offering an alternative to the Scottish gift market. Bored of the tartan tatt, rip-offs, crude humour of existing Scottish clothing we wanted to offer something different, something creative, in other words, something we would be willing to wear ourselves. ] We wanted to create designs with a story.  Something that said Scotland but without saying ‘Scotland. We create everything from scratch, drawing inspiration from far and wide, but in most cases they...

There are many different ways to put an image onto a t-shirt, each with their own pros and cons. Vinyl transfers can stretch and crack, Direct to garment printing (like a giant inkjet printer) doesn’t work so well on dark fabrics. To us, screen printing is currently the best way to get vibrant colours and is designed to make it easy for batch printing. The process of ‘screen printing’ has been around for thousands of years, the printing can be traced all the way back to the Song Dynasty in China (960-1279 AD) it was introduced to Western Europe toward...

It’s only right for our first design spotlight to focus on one of our most popular and oldest designs, our ‘Placenames of Scotland’. When refining the concept of Urban Pirate we wanted to focus on Scotland but not just like what was already available. Scottish design is better than shortbread tins, Scotty dogs and ‘see you Jimmy' hats.  So, we aimed to create designs that were timeless and celebrate what is best about Scotland. This design creates the idea that all these great places make up what is great about our little country. The concept for the design came about...

Everyone has heard of the story of Greyfriars Bobby. The wee dog in Edinburgh that sat at his owners’ grave for 15 years without moving. He even has a statue and a pub named after him. Though, through all the fame, most people don’t know what breed of dog he is. Well, he’s one of the oldest living breeds in the world, a Skye Terrier. A breed that is said to be over 400 years old and has held court with queens and royalty.  They were the preferred breed of Queen Victoria and Mary Queen of Scots was said to...