About Central Atlantic Collegiate

Last updated: August 2026

A coastline, a campus that never existed, and a print shop.

Central Atlantic Collegiate is an original apparel label. There is no Central Atlantic University — no campus, no admissions office, no team you can bet on. What there is: a drawing table, a stack of old regatta programmes and yearbook endpapers, and a stubborn belief that the best-looking sweatshirt anyone ever owned came from a school bookstore in about 1974.

So we draw the crests that bookstore would have sold. Rowing clubs, harbor societies, a fieldhouse, a lighthouse, a track team. Then we print them properly and send them out one order at a time.

Not affiliated with any school

Every mark on our garments is our own artwork, drawn in house. Nothing here is licensed by, affiliated with, or endorsed by any real university, college, athletic department or alumni association. If a design reminds you of somewhere you actually went, that is the era talking, not a licence agreement.

Drawn here, printed to order

Nothing is printed until you order it. That is deliberate: it means no dead stock, no end-of-season landfill run, and no colourway that only exists because a factory had a minimum. It also means your order takes a day or two longer than a warehouse would — we think that trade is worth it, and we would rather tell you that up front than pretend otherwise.

How a design gets made

1. The reference. Old programmes, pennants, gym-class badges, chart room ephemera. We look for what the ink did, not just what the logo said.
2. The drawing. Every crest is redrawn from scratch, flat enough to screen print and simple enough to still read from across a room.
3. The ink. Two to four colours, water based, cream carrying most of the linework so the whole line shares one palette.
4. The print. Made to order in the US, checked, folded and shipped from Connecticut.

Five lines, on purpose

Line	What it is
Tees	Heavyweight cotton short sleeves — the backbone of the whole thing.
Long Sleeves	Midweight cotton for the months either side of summer.
Crewnecks	Heavyweight fleece, brushed inside, cut like the library-basement original.
Hoodies	Cotton-blend pullovers, lined hood, kangaroo pocket, print sitting above it.
Caps & Bags	Embroidered six-panel dad hats and heavyweight canvas totes.

Why the colour list is short

Six colourways: Vintage Black, Navy, Maroon, Forest Green, Charcoal and Royal Blue. All of them dark or mid, and that is the point — the cream ink stays exactly the same across the whole catalogue, so a crest looks like itself on every garment we make. Adding a pale colourway would mean changing the ink, and a changed ink is a different shirt wearing the same name.

House rules

• We draw every mark ourselves. No traced logos, no borrowed crests, no real school's property.
• We print after you order, never before.
• We quote garment measurements, not vanity sizes — the chart is on every product page.
• We show the actual print colour on the actual garment colour. The swatch you click is the shirt you get.
• We never add surprise costs at checkout. Sales tax is already in the price on the tag.

Where we are

We work out of a studio in Woodbridge, Connecticut, about twenty minutes from the water that half these designs are about. We answer our own email, normally within one business day. Want a closer look at a print, or an honest read on which size to take? Just ask — we would rather talk you into the right size than process the return.