The days when the college jacket was only worn by American college students are gone – today it’s a modern classic. This jacket has long entered the hall of fame of cult clothing. The trendy clothes item is comfortable and can be combined with many things: joggers, skirts, chinos, jeans and even leggings – anything looks cool when combined with this trendy icon. But WHAT are we telling you…? Regardless of how youre going to wear it, we have added it to our product line and i’s ready to order. The jacket is available for women in sizes S – XL and in the colour combinations Black/white, red/white, blue/white and purple/white. Men have a choice of the same colours, only that instead of purple/white they can also choose navy/white. Available sizes for men are M – XXL. The cotton jacket stands out with its stylish constrasting stripes, press buttons and classic hem band on its cuffs.

Personalise this jacket with your own ideas to create your unique and individual item. This jacket is ideally suited to be adorned with initials, slogans, logos and figures. You can print on this jacket  using print methods such as flex, flock, and special flex printing.

And then there’s an extra treat for you. In calendar week 21 we are going to launch our Eastpak rucksack line. This means that you will be available to order the classic Eastpak backpacks “Padded Pak’r“ and “Provider“ in black or midnight with us. Also check out the shoulder bag “Delegate” in black or heather grey. We are already getting excited!

Whether it’s job applicants or business clients, customers or the postman – everyone getting to Spreadshirt’s HQ will have to get past Sylvia first. She explains visitors how the t-shirt designer works, wishes everyone a good morning and lends an ear or offers advise when needed. Most importantly without her the candy jar would always be empty. But it keeps brimming with goodies, so her contribution to the energy level of all of our staff is not to be underestimated. But let us start with the beginning: Sylvia is our Facility and Office Manager, and we would like to take this opportunity to send out a big thank you to her. This is why we say THANK YOU, dear Sylvia!

Next to reception, Sylvia’s area of responsibility comprises of administering the car pool and transport fleet, planning of meetings and further organisational support. What is organisational support? Well, she is our contact person for matters such as missing table lamps, broken radiators and dwindling milk supplies. On last year’s T-Shirt Day she was even assigned the task of making arrangements for the sun to shine on the day. Next to providing a sunny disposition, Sylvia always has spare heels and needle and thread for torn hems on the ready. But she is a humble character all the same, because she calls what makes the work much easier a matter of course.

‘A woman who is able to stand her ground is bound to do this in an organised and diplomatic way,’ she says while admitting that she is probably not one of those women. ’There are women who do not find as favourable circumstances to go to work and look after their children. These are what I call strong women.” Spreadshirt make an effort to help reconcile job with family. And Sylvia has both of her feet firmly on the ground, a fact demonstrated when asked on her performance: ‘If I didn’t do what I do, someone else would do it just as well. You know, the wheels don’t stop turning whenever I’m off on a holiday.’

‘But it is important in my job to keep a keen eye out for several things that happen parallel  at the same time. If I were to only look into the air-conditioning that broke down on the second floor, a lot of other things would be neglected.’ And since multi-tasking capabilities tend to be more of a female stronghold, Sylvia feels compelled to comment ‘Men can only ever see to one thing at a time.’

At home she is happy to have her husband’s support. ’He takes care of the classics such as emptying the dishwasher, taking the rubbish out or putting up furniture. These type of things I don’t really like at all.’ And boys stuff such as playing Lego with her sun is something that she says she would have to give to his dad. In such situations she takes a well-deserved break from everything and gathers fresh energy for the next day.

And we are sure that there are heaps of women like Sylvia out there, girls like pearls who organise lots of things and face everyday life with quick-witted commentary and optimism. And we usually only find out how important they are once we start missing them.

April showers bring logo flowers! A new heart is brought into bloom, and we realized that there were quite a few things that needed some dusting off.

It all started in our headquarters. We collected quite a bit of stuff over the years here and the white walls really needed a bit of color. So, we’ve cleaned out some junk, moved furniture around and splashed a bit of color on the walls. You can see what a difference it makes – our headquarters have been cleaned up and the walls are as colorful as our t-shirts. But I don’t want to waste your time reading about painting and redecorating. There are more important things we’ve been working on. The newly designed logo has given a new and modern shape to the heart, and the slightly different green is as fresh as the spring and our new products. While remaining true to our heart, we have reanimated typeface to breathe new life into our logo.

And whilst we were at it, we reviewed our whole corporate design. Particularly Doreen – one of our great graphic designers – set her hand to the task. Her creative and artistic touch will adorn many of our illustrations and graphic designs in future. But what’s behind all these changes? After ten years of Spreadshirt and five years with our Lovetab logo, the time was just ripe for a fresh breeze. We do not only want to keep our ears on the tracks of time, but also have an eye on quality and creativity. Our new products reflect this idea. And the new logo is only the first of many things that will change at Spreadshirt in the months to come. These changes will also affect remodelling of our homepage as well as the user area for our partners and designers.

Still alive or aleady in decay? Just to think! You wake up one morning and the whole world has turned into a zombie apocalypse. How inconvenient.

Now, what’s a prototype zombie? Wonky walk, restricted ability to communicate and an infatigable appetite for human flesh. I do have a weak spot for zombies – on my screen. To see zombies taking over in reality would be something less desirable, so being prepared can never be wrong! Here are the top 5 survival rules deduced from Zombieland, 28 Days Later, Cockneys vs Zombies as well as the TV series The Walking Dead:

#1 Team up with other survivors In case of a zombie apocalypse, human company is ever so helpful.

#2 Don’t forget to pack fresh underpants and socks. You never know when you return…

#3 Travel with pensioners. Senior citizens make for spritely and vigorous fighters (and are slower than you).

continue reading ‘Beginner’s guide for zombies: Top 5 survival rules’

Oh boy, time does fly. It’s been 2 months since we last introduced a new product to you. Time to catch up, here we go! continue reading ‘New at Spreadshirt: Many bright and colourful things make life better’

So, you have a good shop and an excellent brand identity. You are engaging with your customers and you have a clear idea of what you are about. But you need products to sell and thinking of fresh ideas can be difficult. This is where hot topics research comes in handy. This short article is designed to help you find new ideas to keep your business growing and relevant.

The first step is to not forget your brand identity. Yes orange may be popular right now but your shop is all about blue and if you suddenly switch to orange you can turn off your existing customers, at least you would confuse them. So, whenever you do your hot topics research you have to keep in mind what your shop is about. Everything we suggest here is going to be simple and easy to implement as this is just an introduction.

First, keep your ears and eyes open. You may notice among your friends and family that certain trends, memes and other things may be suddenly popular. Also keep an eye on the news and on your various social sites. You may catch the next meme just as it is starting if you are observant enough. If you feel this meme or major event applies to your shop, take advantage of it and make designs and products around it. Being first on the scene with the t-shirt that has that new meme may make your year.

Second, we recommend you keep a close eye on your site’s analytics. If you have a separate website we suggest you install Google Analytics upon it. This will let you see how many visitors you have, and more importantly what they are searching for. Keep a very close eye on your search query report as it will let you see what is currently popular and is driving traffic to your site. If you find most of your customers are looking for “blue fish” then maybe it’s time to have some “blue fish” products?

Next, we suggest you keep a close eye on trending topics. Go to major social sites like twitter, Facebook, reddit and others to see what is currently popular or becoming popular. There are various tools and websites available to show you trending data and there’s websites like knowyourmeme.com that track meme’s as well. Overall, you just want to keep a close eye on trending topics and try to catch the wave. If you keep your ears and eyes open you will find topics that are highly relevant and could potentially make you a lot of money.

Blue skies, the sun is shining, t-shirt weather all around – spring is finally here! With such nice temperatures, you also see far more people on the streets enjoying the sun, as if the world suddenly came to life again. And among the girls shopping for spring clothes, boys playing football and families going out for ice cream, there are also roaming groups of maybe 5 to 10 men or women, all dressed in funny t-shirts, laughing loud and having fun. Well, can you guess what I am talking about? Exactly – wedding season has started and so has the time for hen nights and stag parties.

I have taken part in a hen night, too – last summer, a week before my wedding. I was so nervous before it started! In Germany it is common to play silly games with the bride, to make her wear strange outfits and to have her sell junk to strangers out of a vendor’s tray. I didn’t really want any of this stuff, especially wearing a bunny costume or something similar would have been a definite no go. But thanks to my great friends who organised the hen night, there was no need to be afraid, my hen night was great and so were our outfits. Of course, we had hen party t-shirts from Spreadshirt as you can see here:

Our wedding’s theme was “Royal Wedding”, that’s why my shirt says “Princess Victoria is getting married”. I loved it! And I also loved the whole day my friends had organised. We went on a “world tour” through our city, and every station we went to symbolised another country, where I had to experience typical wedding traditions from that country or continent. So, we went to “Europe”, symbolised by a park, where we ate a typical wedding cake and I threw a bouquet made of spring flowers. Among others, we also visited the United States, symbolised by the city’s tower (looking a little bit like the Empire State Building) and South America aka a club playing Latin music, where we danced all night and had a lot of fun.

All in all it was a really great day and I enjoyed it to the fullest. And what about you? What would be a typical hen or stag night tradition for your country, family or friends? Maybe you are getting married this year and you’re already afraid of the crazy costume you might have to wear? Well, why don’t you give your friends some helpful advice:  Get your outfits from Spreadshirt! You can find some inspiration on our pages forhen night t-shirts or stag night t-shirts or you can just create your own in the designer. Either way, with this piece of advice you can make sure that you won’t have to run around in a bunny costume on your hen party

Finishing school is such a bittersweet experience. Sure, you finally made it, you graduated, ideally with good marks, and a bright future lies ahead of you. But at the same time, the last day at school means farewell. You have to say goodbye to most of your classmates, to your teachers, maybe even to your hometown because you will move somewhere else to study or work. But don’t be too sad – there is a perfect way to save all the lovely school memories and look good at the same time: With personalised leavers hoodies!

With Spreadshirt, you can design your own leavers hoodies for your whole class or school. One of the advantages we offer is the possibility to design every hoodie differently. You could put the student’s name on his unique hoodie or include each student’s A-levels subjects in the design. And you can still get a volume discount starting from 6 products, even with different designs on every hoodie.

In addition, if you want to order leavers hoodies with the same print for every student, our bulk service team is here to help you. They offer individual quotes for orders with 50 products or more with the same print. And – we wouldn’t be Spreadshirt if we didn’t think about what customers want most – they also have the possibility to create the popular varsity design with your classmates names forming the year you finished school for you. So if you have been looking for a place to print your leavers hoodies with, go ahead and contact our bulk team here.

Of course there are also other possibilities to keep nice souvenirs of your school time. In Germany for example, it is common to get graduation t-shirts instead of leavers hoodies – So maybe, if one of your favourite subjects was German, you’d rather have some t-shirts printed? If that’s not the case, then another way to keep some memories of your classmates, your friends, your enemies and people you never spoke to would simply be to take a nice group picture, frame it and hang it on your wall – or keep it in a drawer to only take it out on special occasions In any case, don’t let your school time go by without a nice souvenir of it!

So you’ve developed your brand identity and you are interacting with your audience on Twitter and Facebook. So far, though, we have missed one major marketing platform: Google. Now it is time to tackle this area. Getting your shop and your products to show up in Google isn’t easy but you can dramatically increase your chances of showing up in relevant searches with a few simple steps.

The first thing you will need to do is do some basic keyword research. You know your products best but try to put yourself in a potential customer’s point of view. What terms would they use to find your product? Think long and hard on this, there are several tools that will help you with this such as Adwords Keyword Tool you can find at adwords.google.com.

Now, once you know what keywords you want to target say “Product-name T-Shirts”, you are going to take some basic steps so Google knows that your website is a good place for these terms. Remember, as smart as Google is they aren’t mind-readers and the robot Google uses to check webpages can’t always figure out what your website is about. This is why you need to give it as many hints as possible. When you create your product make sure the product name is descriptive and unique. Make sure the description includes a short but highly descriptive summary of what your product is. Using the keywords you researched earlier helps a lot for this. Furthermore, make sure that you fill out all the tags you can think as long as they are relevant to your product. If your product is about t-shirts, do not tag it with mugs, this will create confusion.

Google loves good, unique content and more of it you have on your page the better. If you are hosting your shop on your own website, it would be a good idea to write more content and start a blog that relates to your products. If Google’s robots crawls your page and finds a wealth of highly relevant content to a certain keyword it will make you rank for that keyword. Just remember to keep your content relevant and good. Do not simply repeat the keyword over and over again, check against spelling errors, and think of engaging content your readers would actually enjoy.

Want more information? Check out our Spreaducation section of our website: http://www.spreadshirt.com/spreaducation-marketing-C3558

Social Media is a buzz word lately and every business, small and large, is trying their best to make the best of it. Social media is a powerful tool because it allows you to directly connect to your audience for little to no cost. But it isn’t as easy as it seems. You cannot just get a twitter and assume people will flock to you. You have to ask yourself a fundamental question: What do you have to say that people want to hear?

Building up an audience on social networks is the most difficult thing one can do for themselves but it also pays off large dividends. Some people will just buy followers but that will get you nowhere. What makes social media valuable is how highly relevant your audience is. There’s no guess work, these are people who like you and want to hear what you have to say. So you have to make sure what you have to say is engaging.

First thing’s first: What does your audience what to hear? Sure, it may be nice for you to only talk about this week’s promo or this new product you’re pushing but why do people love you? Is it great designs? Is it witty jokes? Is it politically relevant content? Only you know what you do best, find that and embrace it on your social media.

Don’t be afraid to engage with your audience and talk back to them. See what they like and provide it to them.

Remember, content is king and you need to give your audience a reason to visit your page. From there, you have to find them. Talk to thought leaders in your industry, be personable and go to communities and forums that are about your area. Don’t rush things and don’t seem like you’re trying to simply gather followers. That will turn people off. Social media is about interacting with your audience and you must never forget that. Social media a great tool but if you misuse it, it will get you nowhere or could turn off your audience.