Monthly Archives: August 2012

Aug 21 2012

Affordable Embrodiery and Guam Patches Now Available for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Gis, and Other Apparel Including Jackets

Affordable Embroidery

Looking for affordable custom embroidery? We custom design and service your embroidery needs on hundreds of apparel items. All our embroidery work is high-quality products, with most of our embroidery made in the United States. Email us at sales@gerardaflaguecollection.com for inquiries and send us your designs if you’ve got them in hand. Send us any quotes you might have from another embroidery provider and we will make an effort to beat their prices.

Modern Guam Seal Patches

Through the Gerard Aflague Collection, we have recently released several large-sized embroidered patches with our exclusive Modern Guam Seal design appropriate for many different types of apparel, but most popularly for Brazilain Jiu Jitsu Gis. These high-quality patches come in 5, 7, and 9 inch sizes, and are multicolored with the word “Guam” in bright red, bright yellow, and bright blue.

These patches are absolutely the best designed Modern Guam Seal patches that exist online for purchase. Each nine inch patch has over 120,000 stitches. This is one of the highest counts for such a patch of its kind. Unlike many of the patches made in China, our patches are proudly made in the United States.

Our nine inch version will provide the best look on Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) Gis, Karate Gis, Sports Jackets, Leather Jackets, and other sports gear, as it shows the island logo best from many feet away. Our five and seven inch versions also make a great impression but would be most appropriate on pant leg, arm, and bag applications. All our Modern Guam Seal patches come with both a heat applied backing as well as a small perimeter edge of material to allow a seamstress to affix a patch to a piece of apparel.

Many islanders who practice the art of Gracie Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in Guam and across the mainland, and who are avid Fokai followers, have been inquiring about high-quality Guam Seal patches that are embroidered and appropriate for martial arts gis. Some of our male and female Chamorro (Chamoru) or Guamanian Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioners, fighters, and competitors on Guam, Japan, Hawaii, and California seek high-quality embroidered Guam Seal patches to represent our island of Guam and the Pacific. One such competitor from California recently requested for patches in anticipation for his international competition.  It’s because of customer inquiries that we have been able to provide these awesome patches to our customers.

Guam patch

While we have these patches available, we also have other more affordable patches including what you see on your left, which is a large seven inch patch of the word Guam together with a petroglyph drawing which is found in one of Guam’s caves, as well as a Chamorro – Hafa Adai 2×4 inch patch shown below.

Chamorro - Hafa Adai patch

Chamorro – Hafa Adai patch

We also offer direct embroidery of our designs on various apparel. If you are interested in any of our patches, please visit our online store at GerardAflagueCollection.Com. To inquire about getting your gear embroidered directly with our exclusive Modern Guam Seal design, please leave us a message on our website.

On this post,  you will find a few photographs of Jiu Jitsu gis with the Modern Guam Seal patch affixed.

Aug 14 2012

Giving Back to Our Island Home in Our Small Way by Helping Guam’s Homeless

The last four months of doing business as Gerard Aflague Collection has been positive – overall. We’ve attended three large island-themed public events in California and Colorado, are working with Faith Bookstore in Guam to retail our products, and have served customers online from Guam, Saipan, throughout the mainland, as well as Germany and Japan.

We look forward to networking with more folks…with a wider audience. We are doing just that. We’ve begun working with the Facebook group 671 Recipes to connect with over 20,000 subscribers to spread the word about our work, and we are working with smaller stateside contacts who retail their goods at local events all across the mainland. We see our efforts to connect being nothing but a positive experience.

We’ve seen what the power of social media can do in terms of connecting us. We’ve been very encouraged by many folks who have mentioned that we are doing a good thing by creating beautiful things that personify our pacific island lifestyle, culture, and heritage. But we wanted to do more. We began to offer inspirational products. But this still wasn’t enough in our minds.

As we thought about what we were doing, we asked ourselves how hard would it be to give back a small percentage of our sales or in-kind donations to help the homeless situation in Guam. So we entered into conversations with the Salvation Army in Guam and came to understand the connection between drug addiction and homelessness. While they receive grant funding for their efforts, they could always use the extra help from other sources.

So starting in mid-August, we will be donating a portion of our sales to the Salvation Army in Guam to assist the homeless. We are happy that they were receptive to our call. We hope that giving back to our island home in our small way will bring about some value to their great efforts to support our island home and its people.

Si Yu’os Ma’ase.

 

 

 

Aug 12 2012

We’ve Expanded Our Wares

We thought we’d bring you up to speed on what has been happening over the last several months. In a nutshell, we’ve expanded our products on Gerard Aflague Collection.

While we began by offering primarily basic poster illustrations, we now have expanded our offerings so that customers can now select various types of museum quality prints to choose from, including Giclee posters, canvas, aluminum slate, wall adhesives, as well as our fine art plaques.

If you have not visited us over the last several months, we have also added a host of home and office products including shower curtains, rugs, glassware, i-phone cases, totes, coasters, and t-shirts. Much of these products are essentially made for gift-giving.

In the last few weeks we’ve added some blankets that are pretty neat as they are printed edge to edge and are a dual use product. They keep you warm, and when not used, can be hung on a wall as decor.

 

We have also added some unique gift-sized table top and wall hanging plaques, some of which are very popular with islanders including the plaque that asks your visitors to take off their footwear.

In the interest of pacific island folks, we’ve tried to expand our products so you can have more choices for gift-giving and decor.

Remember, that while we are all about creating new and interesting products, we always are available to custom design a product for your specific need. Thank you and Si Yu’os Ma’ase.

Aug 12 2012

Premium Fine Art Products Come Center Stage, More Being Prototyped

High-End Guam-Themed Fine-Art Plaques Now Available

Weekly we wrestle with what to offer as a new product. We brainstorm what most customers can find online and identify gaps. We came up with the following things: t-shirts, jewelry, wristbands, mugs, and the other more common things that come up on a Google search. So we knew what was not being offered.

We thought that what was needed was home decor that was of fine-art caliber. That was an area that was not being met. But we began with the end in mind, like everything else that we do. So we set out a few goals. We wanted our customer to be able to afford a fine-art product, be satisfied with the construction and quality of the products, and be over-joyed with what they eventually will hold in their hand and show those around them.

We designed a couple of products that we thought would resonate with them. Using paper and pen, we sketched out a concept of what we wanted to create. We thought their culture and family name were very close to their heart, so we decided to target meeting these two areas.

We brainstormed and asked ourselves, what can islanders choose as a fine-art piece that speaks of their island home, or in some cases their family and clan names (in Guam, family names are further broken down into sub-clan names using a term that distinguishes one branch of a clan from another). This is sort of like creating categories of families within clans.

So we can up with a design where we’d panel 16 of our choice illustrations of Guam, and create a center piece that essentially and literally pops creating a shadow effect. The two examples we came up with were our Guam-themed and Custom Name two-stack plaque. We wanted to create some pretty substantial fine art pieces that islanders can be proud of displaying in their homes and offices.

We worked with production to bring this to life, and we were absolutely blown away with not only its clarity, vividness, and clean feel, but also its beauty. We were so happy with it, we felt that we could easily begin offering it for sale.

So in these two images, we present what we now have available. They are both sized at 11 x 22 x 1 inch in dimension, and weight approximately 4 pounds. They can be wall mounted with provided hardware, as well as propped on an easel and displayed on a table top.  While these are substantial in size, we are considering coming up with a smaller size that is priced less.


This first product is a generic Guahan plaque that exemplifies the essence of Guam in picture. With a bamboo motif font, the word Guahan is set on center and is raised about a half-inch from the bottom plaque.


This second product is a customized family name plaque. We offer customers the ability to place their family name, and if they desire, their Chamorro family branch name, and the date their own family was established (or in some cases, the year that their family name or clan was established, which could be hundreds of years past).

As you can see, both of these pieces are not only bright and vivid, but they also are a lifetime family heirloom. We scoured the United States to find what is essentially the best plaque company in the nation with the most superior quality construction and someone we were happy to work with. We are happy to say that we found that partnership. And because of our relationship, we now can say that we will be offering an array of plaque products for customers that expect the very best in what they purchase.

Click > To see the Guahan Plaque Product
Click > To see the Family Name Plaque Product