Harmony t-shirt: Make a Packing Tape Handle

Design by: ian

In Chinese markets it’s super common to carry boxes with an improvised packing tape handle. It’s a simple idea: make four or five tape loops over the top of the box and then crush them together into a handle. Bunnie Huang’s new Huaqiangbei adventure kit even includes ‘please make a tape handle’ in the useful phrases section.

It seems fitting to memorialize the hard working tape handle on the first shirt in our new Harmony Fashion Line (pronounced har-man-y). Each shirt captures the sights, the sounds, the very essence of the world’s largest electronics market.

Harmony parodies westerners with Chinese character tattoos that are either meaningless, or in some cases quite lewd. On the flip side, it also draws on fashion from all over Asia with poor English translations, misspellings, and sometimes totally indecipherable text.

How does the text translate? It could be ‘Dual action laminating anti-bubble machine’, or maybe ‘Make a packing tape handle’. It doesn't matter. The true meaning is always Harmony.

Harmony will quickly be at home in any geek’s vintage video game, CON, or Linux t-shirt collection. At $6.95, this custom printed t-shirt is guaranteed to fade and unravel after only a few washings! 


Harmony #1 is currently available in rose pink and powder blue. Sizes are Chinese XXXL (US XL/L) and XXL (US L/M) and run quite small. We’re working to find suppliers with larger and smaller sizes.