About
Straight answers
A small clothing label for poker players, run from Switzerland, printed to order. What follows is what we can actually show you — and where the gaps are.
How it started
The game changed. The table didn’t.
I played baseball with the same group of men from 1991. One by one they went — a knee, a job, a kid, the usual arithmetic of getting older. Somewhere along the way I looked up and found I was the last one still turning up. I stopped in 2007.
It was the year I got divorced. And it turned out I hadn’t only stopped playing baseball.
I’d stopped seeing anybody.
Then Brian called. Brian is a Twins fan, which in Switzerland takes some commitment. He said: why don’t you come and play poker on Friday, at Jan’s? We all play, every Friday. The old Dragons.
There was one problem. I didn’t know how to play poker.
He said: no problem, man. I’ll teach you the basics and that’ll be enough. Two sessions. That was the entire education, and it still is.
The following Friday I walked into Jan’s place. Matt, Jan, Bruno, Fred — who everyone calls Grizzly — and one or two others I’ve since lost track of. Twenty-franc buy-ins, ten and twenty centime blinds. I left up about forty francs, which I took at the time as conclusive proof that I was the best player in the room.
I wasn’t. But that isn’t why I came back the following Friday.
I came back because they were there. The game had changed. The table hadn’t.
Pat sat on the baseball committee with me, alongside every one of the men who now play at Jan’s. We were useless together and we laughed the entire time. Whenever anything remotely improbable happened, Pat said the same thing.
Make a logo. Or: make a shirt.
He said it for fifteen years. It took me all fifteen to do it.
Why it exists
Made for the ones who keep turning up
Poker is sold on the pot. The pot is the part that goes away. What lasts is that a group of men who would otherwise have drifted apart completely — jobs, knees, kids, divorces — still sit in the same room on a Friday, and have done for years.
89 Suited is made for that. Not for the player who wants to be seen winning. For the one who keeps showing up.
Which is why nothing here shouts. No card fans, no royal flushes, no chips printed across the chest. The designs are written in the language of the table — the hands worth playing, the lines everyone recognises, the jokes you only get if you’ve sat through a long session. They are deliberately quiet.
Nobody across the room will read them. The person across the table will. That is the whole audience, and it is enough.
Who’s behind it
One person, eighteen years at the table
89 Suited is run by Didier Rieder, from Switzerland. It’s a small operation — the same person chooses the blanks, writes the product pages, answers the emails and handles the returns. There’s no team page because there’s no team. If you write to us, you’re writing to him.
Two sessions with Brian in 2007 was the whole formal education. Everything after that came from Fridays, and eventually from tournaments: sixteen live results between 2011 and 2025, one win, and $24,894 in earnings — all of it public, including the years it went nowhere. It is not a living and was never meant to be. It does mean the person writing these pages has spent eighteen years at the table rather than reading about it.
That’s also what decides the blanks. The print is the easy part. What matters is the neck construction, the weight of the cotton and whether the shoulder seam is taped — the three things that decide whether a shirt is still in your drawer in two years. They’re stated on every product page rather than left vague.
What we make
T-shirts, hoodies, polos, caps and beanies for people who play poker. Heavyweight cotton and brushed fleece, cut relaxed, printed direct-to-garment or embroidered depending on the piece.
Each product page carries the weight in ounces, the fibre content and the construction. If a detail isn’t on the page, it’s because we couldn’t verify it — not because we’re saving it for the small print.
Printed after you order, not before
We hold no stock. Every piece is printed once someone buys it, at the production facility closest to the delivery address, then shipped from there. That’s why an order takes a few days longer than something pulled off a shelf.
It’s also the only environmental claim we’re willing to make. We’re not going to tell you that a cotton t-shirt saves the planet. What we can tell you is that we don’t manufacture garments nobody asked for, so none of ours is destroyed unworn — which is the fate of a great deal of clothing made on a forecast.
What the clothes are actually made of
Most of the range is combed ring-spun cotton. Heather shades carry a share of polyester, which is what gives them their depth — and it’s stated on each product page rather than buried.
Where a piece uses organic or recycled fibre, its own product page says so and names the material. We’d rather name the specific item than make a claim about the whole catalogue.
If a product page doesn’t mention organic cotton, the product isn’t made of organic cotton. That’s the whole policy.
Where your order comes from
We print regionally rather than shipping everything from one country. A United States order is produced and dispatched inside the United States; a European order inside Europe. Your parcel crosses fewer borders, arrives sooner, and for most customers carries no import charges.
Production takes two to five business days, delivery another three to seven. In practice, expect your parcel five to twelve business days after ordering. Busy periods and remote addresses add a few days, and we’d rather say so here than in an apology later.
Straight answers
The things people write in about
Answered before you have to ask.
Is this a real company or a drop-shipping storefront?
It’s a real label with a real catalogue, and the manufacturing is outsourced to a print-on-demand partner. Both of those are true at once. We choose the blanks, we design the prints, we write every product page — and we don’t own the printing press. Anyone telling you their small clothing brand owns its factory is usually telling you something else.
Why should I pay more than for a generic poker t-shirt?
Because of the blank, the neck construction and the print method — the three things that decide whether a shirt survives a year. If those don’t matter to you, a cheaper shirt is a perfectly rational purchase and we won’t pretend otherwise.
Do you ship internationally?
Yes. Shipping starts at $4.95, free over $89, and the rate is shown again at checkout before you pay. You’ll never discover a shipping cost after entering your card details.
What if something’s wrong with my order?
Write to us within thirty days. A piece that arrives faulty, misprinted or genuinely mis-sized is our problem. Because each item is made for one person, we ask you to check the measurements before ordering rather than after — but that’s a request, not a way of avoiding the question.
If a product page doesn’t say it, we’re not claiming it.