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ANTALYA.GIFT · ABOUT
Why this store exists
A shop, and an experiment.
01 · The experiment
A shop, and an experiment
Antalya.gift sells shirts. It was also set up to find out something, and we would rather say so plainly than pretend this is only retail.
The question is whether a city can be carried into the world properly by the people who live in it and love it — designed, not mass-produced; specific, not generic; sold to anyone anywhere without waiting for a ministry, a license or a campaign budget. Nobody has really tried it for a whole city. We are trying it for ours, in public, and we intend to leave a record of how it went.
Nobody has really tried it for a whole city. We are trying it for ours, in public.
Antalya.gift
02 · The shelf
What we found when we looked
Before we drew a single design, we went looking at how the great cities of the world let people take them home. London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Barcelona, Athens, Rome. Not the guidebooks — the shops.
The best of them are very good indeed, and every one is built on something smaller than a city. Berlin has a beloved brand grown entirely from the little man on its pedestrian traffic lights. Paris has the Eiffel Tower’s own shop, which will send you a piece of the tower anywhere in the world. London has a transport museum that turned a century of posters and the woven fabric from its underground seats into scarves, prints and cushions people genuinely want. Excellent businesses, all of them, and we have learned from each. But a tower is not Paris. A traffic light is not Berlin. A seat fabric is not London.
A tower is not Paris. A traffic light is not Berlin. A seat fabric is not London.
Antalya.gift
Underneath them sits the other half of the shelf, and it is the same shelf in every city on earth: the same magnet, the same keyring, the same printed skyline, designed by nobody in particular and made a long way from the place it claims to be about. Visitors to Rome are told, article after article, to walk past the miniature Colosseums and find something real. Very often there is nothing to find.
So here is the odd thing. Some of the most visited cities in the world — older and busier than ours — have no single place where a person who loves that city can find it made properly. The slot is empty almost everywhere. Not because the idea is hard to understand, but because the work is slow: it takes hundreds of designs, each one actually drawn, before a shop is a shop rather than a shelf.
That is the work we decided to do for Antalya.
What happens in Antalya comes home with you
Designed in Antalya
03 · The province
Why Antalya deserves it
Antalya is not a beach with a hotel strip attached. It is a province, and the sea is only the first thing you notice.
The city was founded by Attalos II of Pergamon around 150 BC. You still walk through a gate built for Hadrian in AD 130. The Yivli Minaret has been fluted since 1230. The theater at Aspendos still fills up. Kekova slid under the water and stayed there. Termessos sits in cloud. Saint Nicholas — the actual one, the bishop who became Santa Claus — was from Myra, which is Demre, an hour and a half down the coast. Oranges are picked here in winter. The loggerheads still come ashore to nest at Çıralı and Patara.
150 BC · AttaleiaAD 130 · Hadrian’s Gate1230 · Yivli MinaretAspendosKekovaMyra · Demre
None of that fits on a fridge magnet, which is exactly the point. It fits on a shirt, if somebody takes the trouble.
Antalya.gift
Attaleia (Antalya today). Been great since 150 BC
Attaleia, founded by Attalos II
04 · A civic project
What we mean by calling it a civic project
Three things, each of which you can check on us.
I
The range is a record of the province, not of its best-selling view.
A commercial shop would print Konyaaltı at sunset a hundred ways and stop. We keep drawing Termessos, Patara, Demre, Kumluca, the Lycian Way, the wild goat in the Taurus and the ancient cities most visitors never reach, because a place is entitled to be represented by more than its postcard. Some of these will never be our best sellers. They stay in the range anyway.
II
Every date on every design is true.
150 BC belongs under the city’s name and nowhere else. AD 130 belongs to Hadrian’s Gate, 1230 to the Yivli Minaret. We do not invent founding claims, we do not print tourism figures as though they were measurements, and we do not borrow another city’s landmarks to stand in for ours. A shirt that teaches somebody something false about Antalya is worse than no shirt.
III
What gets advertised is the city, not us.
A tourism advertisement is a claim. A shirt somebody chose and paid for is a testimonial, worn for years, in Munich and Warsaw and Chicago, by a person who will be asked about it. We think that is one of the most effective and least used instruments a city has, and we would like Antalya to be the place that proves it.
A shirt somebody chose and paid for is a testimonial, worn for years, by a person who will be asked about it.
Munich · Warsaw · Chicago
05 · House rules
How we work
One idea per design, readable from across a room. Every design drawn for this store and owned by it. The whole province, not only the old town. We print on one heavyweight garment-dyed tee, chosen because it keeps its shape and its color, and we print each one after it is ordered rather than warehousing a thousand of anything. New collections arrive as drops, each built to show the whole range rather than one style twenty-five times over. And every design carries the name of the place it is about — a house rule, not a habit.
One idea per designDrawn for this storeThe whole provinceOne heavyweight teePrinted to orderThe place’s name, always
New collections arrive as drops. Six of the seventeen so far:
06 · The method
If it works
Then the store is only half of what we will have made. The other half is a method: a documented, repeatable way for a city to be designed, made and sent out into the world by its own people, at a standard it deserves. We are writing it down as we go.
Antalya is a good place to prove it. Other cities are welcome to the idea.
Other cities are welcome to the idea.
Antalya.gift
Antalya.gift is owned and operated by Integrated Success Initiative LLC, San Diego, California, and is proudly sponsored by Antalya Global Foundation (AGF). It is an independent brand, not affiliated with any government body, municipality or tourism authority.
ANTALYA.GIFT
Stay with Antalya. A little longer.
Mountains on one side. Sea on the other
36.8969° N, 30.7133° E