Looking up.

I figure the best (and easiest) way to tell you about us is to just reprint our first press release. And yes, if I had worn an Uppityshirt in the above photo I'd look at least 10 lbs smarter.

UPPITYSHIRTS TRIES TO SMARTEN UP THE T-SHIRT WORLD. LITERALLY.

Recalcitrant, incorrigible (and a few other choice words) fit “Mr. Write” to a tee.

Weston, Connecticut (November 6, 2008) – If you don’t know what recalcitrant means, I wouldn’t bother reading any further. Seriously, Timothy Cataldo was walking into Clark’s Dairy in New Haven, Connecticut one day recently when he bumped into a woman wearing a t-shirt that said, simply, “ho”. His first thought was ho means “good” in Cantonese. His second: how could such an obviously intelligent (and educated) Ivy-Leaguer wear something so trite and demeaning? He decided to start a company right then and there to dumb t-shirt humor up, and save the world.

Thus Uppityshirts (UP-i-tee shirts, get it?) was born, mostly as an antidote to what Cataldo sees as today’s pervasive and persistent sophomor(on)ic humor and lame p.c. posturing. The first Uppityshirt, a tongue-in-cheek ode to that lost lovely, “Yalebait”, was an immediate hit and soon sold out. Uppityshirts.com now has a Baker’s Dozen, including “incorrigible”, “I’d Rather Be Grammatically Correct” and “impeccable”.

Cataldo, raised in Wrentham, MA, became an English major in college “mostly because it took the least amount of work”, but fell in love with words and became a journalist then a copywriter, (it paid more) before finally becoming a full-time father. While watching his children grow up he has noticed, or thinks he has anyway, the decline of literacy and level of language i.e. vocabulary of most Americans, especially the young. “I really think people are smart and clever and hungry for knowledge and want to show it” says Cataldo, “and that they’re tired of unoriginal, trendy, me-too t-shirts, for example, that at the end of the day don’t say anything.”

Shortly after moving from New York City to white-glove Connecticut in 2002, Cataldo, a stay-at-home father of three was looking for a business to start out of his home when he literally bumped into the wrong person. He came up with the name uppity, which means “rebelliously self-assertive; not inclined to be tractable or deferential” because it unfortunately suited his personality perfectly, and embodied the old-school attitude he wanted to figuratively get off his chest. Also, subtlties.com was already taken.

Uppityshirts has been growing slowly and steadily and has allowed Cataldo to continue his domestic (and connubial) duties, and still have a successful business. Orders are shipped out of a small cottage he has in back of his house, and his 3 children, Jane, James and Cate all help out after school. His wife is an executive at a major publishing company and commutes to New York City every day. She’s so important “she doesn’t even return my phone calls anymore” Cataldo deadpans.

He plans on expanding to about 25 or so designs, and has been introducing a new one every month. The response so far has been almost universally positive. Almost. “When I asked my daughter what she wanted for Christmas she said ‘for you to go into New York and mom to stay home’” Cataldo laughs, but for now he’s going to continue saving the world, one t-shirt at a time.