One family, one T-shirt, three decades: a story we hear regularly.
Customer Stories · St Ives, since 1987
We get told this story a lot. Different names, different summers, same design which is why we wanted to share on one of them.
This one belongs to a family who've been coming to St Ives every summer since 1989. We'll call her Annie…...
The first tee
Annie was eleven the first time she stood in the queue outside Fat Willy's, more interested in the jukebox than the clothes if she's honest. Her parents weren't going to buy anything, it was meant to just be a peek into the shop, attracted by the music wafting out to the street and the eye catching bamboo, foliage and neon colours… her parents were absolutely not going to buy anything but eleven-year-old girls have a way of convincing their parents that they absolutely “must have” something! Of course, Annie left carefully clutching her Fat Willy's tee which she wore until it couldn't be worn any more.
The one that got outgrown, and outgrown again
Annie kept coming back every August for years, the shop becoming as much a fixture of the holiday as the harbour, steak pasties and ice cream. In her twenties she bought a hoodie "for the next holiday," which turned into several holidays, which turned into her bringing her own two children into the shop for the first time in the early 2010s.
The kids, naturally, went straight for the same rail their mother once queued at. One tee became two. Two became a small annual ritual: new sizes every summer, the same bamboo walls, the same jukebox, still playing the same records. Passing the same Fat Willy’s feeling down through the generations. Annie delighting in seeing her own kids observe and become excited by the very same magic that she was drawn to at their age….
Now it's for the grandkids
Fast forward again, and Annie's telling us that she's just bought her first grandchild's Fat Willy's tee. Practically the same design her own mother reluctantly paid for in 1989. She still has that original one, by the way. Folded away, worn and softened by decades of washing, brought out at times to reminisce and revisit fond childhood memories, a item she cannot bear to part with due to the warm memories it evokes, despite it no longer fitting..
"I bought these for my kids, and now it's for the grandkids. I bought one of these back in the 80s. There's just nowhere else quite like it."
It's the same story that we hear from a lot of families who first found us on their Cornish family summer holiday decades ago. The shop has become a must visit destination and punctuation mark on their summer break, generation after generation excitedly revisiting year on year. We don't think it’s just about the T-shirts. We think it's about the bit of St Ives that comes home with you.
If you've got a Fat Willy's story of your own, a T-shirt that's outlived several house moves, three sizes of child, your own persuasive eleven-year-old, we'd love to hear it.
Follow us on social media, tag us and tell us your own Fat Willy’s stories, or better, tell us in the shop next time you visit.
The Fat Willy's Family, St Ives
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