Being back in Germany, I just had a quick FlickR search for the official Barcamp London 6 tag “bcl6″. See a little selection of my favourites above. Pictures credits go to Thomas Euler, Rugby Mad Girl, gorgeoux, alistair_uk, j4mie & Rain Rabbit.

I´m currently in London for Barcamp 6 for which we sponsored the official shirts. For all of you who are not familiar with the concept of a Barcamp - go here. For all others who know what a Barcamp is but couldn´t attend this time: try to come here when you get the chance next time.

The Barcamp London 6 not only takes place in very inspiring surroundings - we´re in the new office of The Guardian, the people here are also very inspiring to listen and talk to.

My definite highlight so far: Sam´s talk about The Guardian´s open API and the Data Store which allow developers and publishers to make apps with news and facts in the making. Besides that, I also really enjoyed a small discussion about how to manage your customers expectations, a presentation about “making kick-ass video navigation” and lots of chat to interesting people like Jan, Tobi (love his Barcamp shirt variation), Carl, and Oliver just to name a few.

P.S. Find more pictures here or here or by just keeping your eyes open for the tag “bcl6″.

Setting up a t-shirt shop can sometimes be a little overwhelming. Wouldn’t the world be a perfect place if someone spent half an hour showing you the ropes, walking you step by step through the most important steps in creating a Spreadshirt shop?

Well, those t-shirt shop newbies out there are in luck! We’ve started the Spreadshirt Webinar Series and are kicking it off with an introductory webinar for new users: the Spreadshirt Bootcamp.

The Spreadshirt Bootcamp provides live instruction from one of our employees on how to:

• customise your shop
• create new products
• upload designs
• use the Marketplace and the Design Gallery

Click here to learn more about the upcoming Bootcamp Webinars. You will find links to register for one of the convenient afternoon and evening times. For the more seasoned users amongst us, we will be providing more webinar topics in the future, so stay tuned. Happy learning!

Tee Junction is the current site of the former Spreadshirt employee and author of this blog, Adam Fletcher. Besides loads of t-shirt deals, there´s some good industry talk on the site as well.

These days, a very nice interview with the man behind the Amorphia Apparel t-shirt shop (for his UK shop, go here), Jeremy Kalgreen, was published and some parts put a big smile on our face. This is one:

I love working with Spreadshirt. There is no way in hell I’d do it silkscreen if I had to do it over again. I want to do the fun part: designing shirts, building websites the creative stuff! I don’t want to have to deal with the boring stuff: billing, shipping, managing inventory and all that noise. But most importantly it leaves me with basically zero overhead and that zero overhead gives me absolute freedom to experiment.

I can make a new design and bring it to market and it doesn’t cost me a penny. If I was silkscreening I’d have to thrown money down up front to make the screens and to print my first batch. That means I’d have to be sure the design would sell, or else I risk losing my shirt. With Spreadshirt I’m free to just try things out, anything that pops into my head is fair game. The only rule is that it has to amuse me, if it does that then we are good to go. Even if it is a joke that only myself and probably two other people in the world might find funny then so be it, I’ll roll with it. If something doesn’t stick no worries. I guarantee you I wouldn’t be in this business today without that flexibility to experiment freely and find what really seems to work for me.

Thanks for the kind words, Jeremy!

For all the others: You can read the rest of the interview here.

Melih (33) has a goal: “We communicate Islam in a language young people can understand, without sacrificing our values in the process.” The shirts in his shop, StyleIslam, focus on the Muslim faith - not in the way you would find in brochures, but with style and character from the point of view of a designer who has taken a good look at the graffiti in his city. A portion of the online sales from his shop is donated to AIDS orphans in Africa. Our interview with Melih:
continue reading ‘Interview with StyleIslam’

As we mentioned in the blog and forum a couple of weeks ago, we want to better optimise your t-shirt shops so they are placed towards the top of the organic search results.

Part 1 went online yesterday (yeah!). The meta tags (title, description and keywords) will now be semi-automatically generated for your t-shirt shops.

Speaking of semi-automatic, you will have to do your part. Trying not to sound parental, this improvement won’t work as planned without a little elbow finger grease. Once again, here are the most important points:

1. Enter the meta data for your t-shirt shop home page. This advice is especially meant for shop partners who had entered their meta data in their own header.
2. Give your t-shirt shops a name (instead of the default 1234567.spreadshirt.co.uk). Both search engines and humans really, really don’t like “naked”, name-less shops.
3. Enter names, descriptions and keywords for t-shirts, hoodies, tank tops, etc. which appear in your shops. This can be done for each product here by clicking on details under the product images.
4. If you use your own categories, also give them a description.

More tips and information can be found in our SEO tutorial for t-shirt shop partners.

We’ll keep you up to date on any future changes. Happy optimising!

It’s getting spring (well, at least a little bit, in Leipzig we had over 10° Celcius and a lot of rain on the weekend). Time for another round of our twardrobe. Huh, twardwhat? The twardrobe is our “be the first to try out exclusively” game on twitter. Here is how it works:

- You follow us on twitter.

- You check our tweets until we announce another round of our twardrobe

- You reply to us with “absolutely”. If you’re lucky (and located in Europe), we pull out your name - and you will be one of the first persons to test exclusively new items that we are listing in a month or so.

- We check back for your size and send you the products. You can keep them as long as you give us your feedback how you like them, for example a video, a foto or a report (German example from the first twardrobe).

If you hurry, you’ll be in this weeks game - this time, we’ll put the brandnew Earth Positive Shirts in the ring, as well as several of our new eco tote bags (all by Continental Clothing).

A little shop-narcissism doesn’t hurt! For those of you out there who love their shop so much that they could sit around all day and order from themselves for themselves, tomorrow until Sunday is your dream-come-true. Every purchase made from your user area from 13th to 15th March will be rewarded with a 15% discount. Simply make your purchases through My Spreadshirt, enter the voucher code MYSHOP during checkout and, poof!, there goes the 15% (by purchasing here, you are also improving your Marketplace ranking ;-). Note: this voucher is not valid in your shops and only works when purchasing through your user area. So, stock up on some spring promotional material, surprise someone with one of your favourite shirts, and have fun shopping!

You can’t say that no one told you – 22 March is a very special day on mum’s calendar.
Some call it Mothering Sunday and others have grown used to calling it Mother’s Day. This may be something that’s up for debate and feel free to let us know what you think!
The fact of the matter is: mothers are not to be forgotten. I was thinking about a special way to make mum smile on 22 March.
Chocolate? Not again.
Flowers? There’s got to be something more original than that.
Surprise her with custom apparel you made yourself? Yes, that’s it! Make her a personalised gift or choose from some of our Marketplace products.

It’s that time of year where we are clearing out our warehouse for the new spring apparel additions. That’s why we are now offering 19 Spreadshirt products at discounts of up to 30 percent! Some of the great deals include the Women’s One Shoulder Top and American Apparel’s Summer Dress for the gals, jerseys and striped shirts for the guys, the Kid’s Country Shirt for the little ones, and knitted caps and gloves for everyone.

P.S. To find out how this clearance looks for shop partners, check out this forum post.