Wilmington, NC -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/21/2010 -- Move over Tommy Hilfiger and Liz Claiborne. Polo, you’ve been knocked off your high horse! A new, national survey of small businesses shows Americans are choosing a new logo on their clothes – their own company logo - as a badge of honor to say, “Hey I have a job and I’m darn proud of it”! The survey of more than 3,700 businesses found that workers are wearing the company logo to places and events well beyond the confines of the cubicle. Fifty percent of employees report they wear company shirts out in public and “love wearing” the logoed shirts, while 27 percent even wear them out with friends.

“It used to be that I would only wear a company shirt if I had to, otherwise it would hang in my closet collecting dust,” says Nicole Volpe of elle hair and spa in Raleigh, NC. “But I’m happy to have this job right now, I’m proud of where I work, and I’ll wear our shirts just about anywhere.”

New Styles in Office Fashion
Office fashion may be gaining new fans because the apparel is hipper, cooler and downright sexier than it’s ever been before. Fred Meyers, owner of Queensboro Shirt Company, an online-only corporate apparel company in Wilmington, NC, is testing a new line of clothing for women with more creative logo application in cool shapes and designs. These artistic creations include:

• Company logos on longer, body hugging t-shirts for women
• Logos tweaked in “art deco” application
• Logos applied in unexpected places on the shirt, not just above the chest
• Logos on all kinds of hip shirt styles with baby doll sleeves, button down shirts with three quarter inch sleeves, tank tops with matching cardigans

“We’re changing the look of corporate apparel with the changing times and sales are up,” says Meyers, who has seen business rise steadily since January. “We have hired fifteen people over the last six weeks just to keep up with demand,” he adds.

“Sales were off in 2009. Our small business customers were hurting and the conditions were tepid for all of us. Now, with all the unemployment blues behind them, folks with new jobs are proud to rock their employer’s logo, especially when they are on clothes they truly feel good wearing. It’s like wearing a billboard that says ‘Look, I have a job!’ and they get to look fashionable at the same time.”

Meyers has seen the evolution of corporate apparel since its inception. His company was the first to put a company logo on a collared shirt, twenty-eight years ago.

More Results of the Survey:

• More than 60 percent of respondents wear branded shirts on a regular basis
• More than 75 percent wear the logoed shirts at least once a week
• More than 62 percent are proud to wear it wherever they go
• More than 44 percent wear it often to show company spirit
• 51 percent wear to represent the company at trade shows and sales calls
• More than 88 percent think they look great in the branded shirts
The survey was commissioned by Queensboro Shirt Company in June 2010, and polled more than 3,700 of its business customers across the nation.

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About Queensboro Shirt Company
Queensboro Shirt Company is an Internet-based apparel business that was the first to put company logos on collared shirts. Fred Meyers, inspired by the “LaCoste” shirts, started the company as a hobby when he was a college student in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in New York City. Today it is a multi-million dollar company, and has tens of thousands of small businesses and consumers as loyal customers who print their logo and designs on collared shirts, tee shirts, hats and many other apparel items.

Queensboro specializes in four-piece minimums and is the only company of its kind to offer an iron-clad, ten year guarantee on all its branded products.

In 1996, Queensboro moved to the seaside town of Wilmington, North Carolina. The company employs 100 people in its 80,000 square foot warehouse and was recently named to the prestigious “Inc 500” list.

For more information, visit http://www.Queensboro.com.