St. Patrick’s Day has most certainly become an international celebration. Parades, green rivers and merry imbibing of Irish drink have become common place around the world on 17th March. Green, Irish-themed t-shirts are no doubt part of the whole fun, and that’s where Spreadshirt U.S. comes in. Spreadshirt.com is running a St. Patrick’s Day T-Shirt Design Contest and, fitting well with the international holiday, should also include some European designers (that would be you). We shouldn’t let the Americans have all the fun!

This still remains a Spreadshirt U.S. design competition, but I invite you, if you haven’t already, to open an account there and submit your idea of a fun St. Patrick’s Day design. Here’s how the whole thing works:

Create a St. Patrick’s Day design, submit it to the Spreadshirt.com Marketplace and tag it with STPATTYCONTEST. We will then select 3 winners and award the following prizes:

• One of three 1st positions in the Bestseller category in the Spreadshirt.com T-Shirt Designer between 25th February and 17th March (One of our most trafficked areas on the site)
• One of three 1st positions in the Holidays & Occasions/St. Patrick’s Day category in the Spreadshirt Designer between 25th February and 17th March
• Winner’s design featured in a Spreadshirt.com St. Patrick’s Day Newsletter sent to Spreadshirt’s house list (Date TBD)
• Design will be featured in the main teaser on Spreadshirt.com homepage
• One coupon for a free product ($35 value + free standard domestic shipping)

Basic Rules

• Contest officially starts on 5th February and ends on 19th February 2010. Spreadshirt will announce the winners on 19th February 2010.
• Your design must be submitted to the Spreadshirt.com Marketplace and tagged with STPATTYCONTEST during the above period.
• Designs should be closely or loosely related to the themes surrounding the idea of the St. Patrick’s Day. Be creative! A generic green clover will definitely not win you the prize.
• The winners will be picked by Spreadshirt.com staff based on following criteria:
  1. Creativity and Originality (New and previously unsubmitted designs have preference)
  2. Versatility (Invites customisation - provokes thought for adding text or multiple designs)
  3. Market Appeal (Immediately attracts attention from the viewer)
  4. Applicability to Apparel (Design can be used on a wide variety of apparel items)
  5. Production (Vector designs are preferred)

So, have a little fun. Take this opportunity to be placed well on the other side of the Atlantic and sell some fun green shirts to some merry Yanks.

A typical day for our Test Lab: print, wash, dry, check, wash, dry, check … as many of you know, we take the quality of our products very seriously. Many of you have been praying, wishing and begging for more products available for our Digital Direct printing technique. Your patience has been rewarded. Here are the newcomers for Digital Direct: continue reading ‘Digital Direct Printing: Now available for even MORE products’

In just a few days that very special day arrives where very special lovers celebrate will be upon us. Just like for birthdays, Mother’s or Farther’s Day, you might be asking yourself, what should I give to my sweethearts, lovers or friends? Chocolate? Flowers? Dinner? or maybe underwear again? How about a change, with a very personal and completely individual declaration of love? Or even better, how about a very personalised declaration of love to dress, to put or to pin on?

So, I’ve been looking around at our marketplace and found some great variations for the traditional gift ideas. All colours of nearly every kind of chocolate or flower are covered by our assortment. Also you will find just about every kind of heart, love, couples or romantic designs in our design gallery - feel free to use them for you personalised declaration of love. continue reading ‘My Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas & Keep that Ordering Deadline in Mind’

Don’t keep pressing that refresh button tomorrow morning if you are trying to get on to Spreadshirt. On Wednesday 3rd February, we will be performing some server maintenance between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. GMT (that’s 6-7 a.m. CET for those continenals amongst us). This means that our entire platform will be down during this time. The update should take between 30-45 minutes to complete. We will also run a second update between 8 and 10 a.m. GMT for the US platform, also taking between 30 and 45 minutes. We’ll be back in top form for you all by lunchtime.

P.S. Of course, failwhale sightings usually occur at Twitter. The great illustration is from one of our shop partners, Yiying Lu. In case you are looking for just the right gift for Valentine’s Day - here’s a special tip.

One of our Shop Partners from France is a big fan of the sea, being an avid scuba diver. But, she wasn’t too impressed with the sea shirts out on the market and decided to make her own. She has since filled her own shop with sea creatures, scuba shirts and diver designs. Plunge into the world of underwater t-shirts with Sea Sea Shirts. Sylvie in interview:
continue reading ‘Sylvie Sells Sea-Shirts by the Sea Shore – Shirts for Lovers of Sealife’

You might remember a contest that we held back in November. Yeah this contest. Of course, the contest is over and the dice have been thrown. More than 1,000 Shop Partners from across Europe took part in the contest by simply selling shirts in their shops. And boy did they sell a lot. Well done to you all!

But then comes the best part. Which of the contestants have been randomly chosen as winners? We proudly present the winning shops:

The winners themselves have known for a while, but we had to work out the details of their prizes. We are now in the process of creating cool flyers or awesome web graphics for their shops. I am looking forward to seeing how our graphics team can help spruce up their shops! Thanks to everyone who (perhaps unknowingly) took part – it was a fun contest!

Customer satisfaction is one of our highest priorities. Clearly stated in our mission, “We want to WOW our customers with exceptional quality and speed.” A vital part of achieving this goal is the ability to measure how well we do this. That’s where the Net Promoter Score (NPS) comes into play and we’ve been using it since 2007.

What is the Net Promoter Score?
NPS is a simple way to measure how satisfied your customers are. It asks one question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” Then the customers choose between 0 (very unlikely) and 10 (extremely likely). The responses are then split into three groups: promoters (9 or 10), passives (7 or 8) and detractors (0 to 6). NPS is then calculated by taking the percentage of promoters and subtracting the percentage of detractors. The score can range from 100% to -100%.

How likely is it that you would recommend Spreadshirt to a friend or colleague?

Why use the Net Promoter Score? continue reading ‘As Always, our Goal is to WOW You – NPS Measures our Promoters’

Our Market Research team loves collecting interesting facts about what customers are searching for, buying and wearing from Spreadshirt. We’re also big fans of letting you guys in on some of these juicy stats.

It’s a common practice to take a look at the numbers from the first and last weeks of the year and then try to see where the market is going and what people like to have on their shirts. This kind of information can be really helpful to Shop Partners looking to add new colours or products to their shop. Long story short, we’ve collected a whole bunch of facts and figures for you all covering the following topics:

• Top Searches 2009
• Top Products 2009
• Top Colours 2009
• Top Words 2009

Enjoy a trip through the stats after the click … continue reading ‘The Top of the Tops 2009′

Looking to add a bit of colour to your wardrobe? Do you like aqua, lemon or perhaps a little red? Then take advantage of our colour blowout sale where we are offering 25% off selected colours of fashionable apparel in our collection. And here’s how it works:

Simply select a defined product to personalise, then enter the coupon code COLOUR2010 when going through check out. All that’s left is to wait for your custom, colourful shirt to arrive. This offer is valid until February 1st, 2010 and available only while supplies last.

Jam, bread and butter seemed like a good combination, so off I went to Berlin last week for the JAM exhibition. Well-known as the “Jeans and Sportswear” exhibition, JAM includes 260 companies from different business fields like Retail-Services, Visual Merchandising, Trend-Forecasting, etc. and is now known as a market for fashionable collections, furniture, music and even space ventilation, as well as online-marketing tools. For me it was quite important to get the news on new fashion trends in sportswear, men’s and women’s casualwear and accessoiries. I also was looking for candidates to add new labels to Spreadshirt’s assortment, especially to find a European newcomer design label for our next additions to the Exclusive Collection (the 20-10 Area was a brilliant place to look for this). I mingled in with the crowd and took a closer look at one or the other style: continue reading ‘JAM and Bread & Butter - A Highly Fashionable Trip to Berlin’