The Dark Reality of the Performance Sun Shirt Pandemic

We know–yours are “made by fishermen for fishermen,” though.

There’s barely enough room for a weed whacker in Travis Gillman’s Pensacola, Florida, garage. From floor to ceiling, boxes tower over me and the 31-year-old former IT specialist turned part time fishing guide turned apparel company owner. In each cardboard casket are meticulously packed hooded performance sun shirts in pastel blue, coral, teal and olive drab. The left breast of each is emblazoned with a barracuda skeleton snarling its teeth. Under every intimidating fish the words “Salty Killer Outdoors” are scrawled in a font identical to that used by the heavy metal band Pantera. Securing this much product set Gillman back a cool $40,000, which he scraped together by putting up his life savings and talking his 84-year-old grandmother and friend Charlie into investing in his brand. There’s just one problem. In the three weeks since Salty Killer Outdoors launched, Gillman hasn’t sold a single sun shirt.

“I really don’t get it,” he says as he opens the Shopify app on his phone. “The brand has 982 followers on Insta, the Salty Killer community is thriving and people know me around here. They know me and my crew go harder than anyone. They know if we’re wearing Salty Killer it’s a brand they can trust. They should know it’s not the same garbage everyone else is making.”

During my three-year, fully immersive investigation into the pop-up sun shirt market, this would not be the last time I’d hear almost these exact words spoken by a perplexed 26- to 34-year-old holding a Yeti tumbler.

The China Syndrome

Several hundred miles east in Georgetown, South Carolina, 62-year-old Rick Berger has just opened his bait and tackle shop up for the day. He skims any dead shrimp or mud minnows out of his tanks as the low morning sun paints the wall of Mirr-O-Lures in a warm orange glow. Bergie’s B & T has been open since 1996, and in the last 30 years, Berger has gotten sales pitches from countless tackle companies and manufacturers insisting their products belonged on his shelves. But according to him, none of them have been more persistent or obnoxious than local kids pushing performance sun shirts.

“They’re like a plague,” Berger tells me. “I swear not a week goes by without some new dude walking in here wearing those Pit Cobra sunglasses telling me why I should be carrying his shirts. It’s always the same script. Bull Red Outdoors, Carolina Reaper Outdoors, High Hooker Apparel, doesn’t matter. They say, ‘We’re local and we think it would be great if our businesses supported each other.’ They wanna shoot TikToks in here that will supposedly increase foot traffic. Then they tell me they’re different. They ‘live it.’ Their shirts are made by fishermen for fishermen.”

If you consider the popularity of angling in Chinese culture, it’s not impossible these shirts are, in fact, made by fishermen for fishermen. In the winter of 2024, I was granted unprecedented access to the Hongyu Sheng apparel manufacturing facility in the Guangdong Province. Approximately 95% of American pop-up performance sun shirt brands use Hongyu Sheng–a testament to the company’s skill at harnessing private messaging targeted directly at anglers on social media.

“If you have pictures on social media holding fish and look like a man-child who doesn’t work for a living, we send you a message,” a grinning Chen Jun, Hongyu Sheng’s CEO, tells me as we eat Peking duck garnished with wild orchids in his sprawling office. “Man-child sees our low prices, sees how easy it is to put some skeleton fish or mermaid on shirt, and decides right then he’s going to start an entire clothing brand.”

Jun erupts into uncontrollable laughter, adding, “And he’s going to do it different!”

After lunch, I’m granted a tour of the facility. In a warehouse space so massive I can’t see the other side, hundreds of children are diligently making performance sun shirts. I’m cautious not to interact with them too much under the watchful eye of my stoic top-brass tour guides. At every sewing station the same coral, pastel blue, teal and olive drab performance sun shirts are taking shape. Further down the line, other children are heat transferring brand names and logos on sleeves and chests. Pine Mountain Outdoors. Salt Crush Outdoors. Get Tight Apparel. Drag Scream Outdoors. Fly-By Gear. On and on it went.

Before leaving for China, I taught myself exactly one phrase in the native language: Do you like to go fishing? Of the 36 children I deftly and quietly asked this question as we walked the factory floor, 30 never lifted their eyes from their work, three just smiled a little and three nodded a hollow yes. I noted the brands being made by the yesses: Streamer Junky Apparel, Rock Solid Outdoors and FishFace Outdoors. Armed with the knowledge that these brands could kind of legitimately claim their performance sun shirts were being made by fishermen, I decided to track them down as soon as I returned to the States.

Performance Issues

Rock Solid Outdoors and FishFace Outdoors were dead ends. I couldn’t find any trace of them on social media, which confirmed something Chen Jun told me during a Shiatsu massage he treated me to at the most exclusive gentleman’s club in Hong Kong.

“Most of the time they buy shirts first, come up with business plan later,” he said. “When nobody likes shirts on Instagram, man-child gives all shirts to friends and sells boat to pay.”

He started laughing so hard the scantily clad masseuse had to stop kneading his thighs for a minute.

But when I found 27-year-old Cody Brammell, the man behind Streamer Junky Apparel, at his parents’ house in Boulder, Colorado, nothing I told him about what I’d learned in China even seemed to compute.

“I hear you, bro,” he said, taking another slug of Black Rifle Coffee from his Yeti tumbler, “But Streamer Junky Apparel is just different. People know how hard I fly fish. They know I’m not gonna sell them anything I wouldn’t wear on the water myself.”

Unlike Travis Gillman in Pensacola who went from inception of Salty Killer Outdoors to launch in a month and a half, it turns out Brammell ordered his shirts on a whim on a Monday, received them a week later and was live on Instagram by Friday. He even spent an extra thousand dollars to boost his launch post, which kind of worked. When I met Brammell he’d been live for two weeks, and so far, sold six performance sun shirts, albeit at a loss because he offered the 50% discount code: MEATLIFE50.

“I’m not worried about it at all,” he told me as he put a new Streamer Junky Apparel sticker on his Rod Vault. “I’ve got a great pro staff repping the brand, you know, mostly my local homies, but they go hard as hell out there. And I’m gonna get the product in a few local fly shops, which will really increase brand visibility. I’m so confident I’ve already got Chat GPT working on a new logo for Popper Junky Apparel. The performance sun shirts in that line will be pretty close to Streamer Junky, just a little different. I’m thinking a bunch of small logos running down both sleeves. Nobody else is doing that.”

Of course, Brammell was incorrect. One year after meeting Travis Gillman, I returned to Pensacola, where things had not gotten any better for Salty Killer Outdoors. Gillman did try to salvage the brand by doing a second limited-edition pressing of sun shirts with small logos running up the front and back of both sleeves, but the nail in the coffin came when four out of his six South Florida pro staffers were cited and publicly shamed for keeping snook out of season. To try and recoup some money, Gillman took to selling shirts at local flea markets, a handful of which were purchased by old ladies for their leathery old husbands who already had a few dozen melanomas removed.

“I blame the tackle shops,” an unshaven Gillman said as he sipped warm Jim Beam out of his Yeti tumbler and stared at the dusty boxes in his garage. “Local businesses should support local businesses, but most of these owners were complete assholes. They had such bad attitudes. Like, so what if I’ve never been in your shop or bought anything there before? I’m making top-quality sun shirts! I have a community! They’ll fly off the rack! If there’s one thing I know, fishermen can’t get enough performance sun shirts with fish skeletons on them.”

---