Constant Paranoia is less my state of mind on a busy Wednesday afternoon, and more a band from Holland. This t-shirt recently made its merry way through our production, and now we know what its destiny was:

Hello Anja,

Received the shirt yesterday. I’m very pleased with it.

The band now has it’s own mascotte and we’ll take him to the shows.

Many thanks for the good service!

Esther

That would be the last thing I would expect a Death Metal band to take along on tour. I guess I’ve never really understood the genre.

We decided to focus this month’s Trend Report on the shopping days and times which our buyers in Europe and North America most love to click on that buy button. Many of differences between North Americans and Europeans are well known, but some of these findings perhaps support those differences (siestas?) or provide us with insights (buying at work?).

North Americans like to part from their money best in the afternoon, whereas Europeans tend to hold on to their hard-earned cash well into the evening. The one exception in Europe are the Italians, who strongly increase their buying from 3 to 4 p.m. – nothing like a nice shirt purchase after a siesta, I guess. The average European really gets into the buying mood between 8 and 9 p.m.

You’ll find a detailed look at the shopping times on the other side of the big pond after the click.
continue reading ‘Trend Report: T-Shirt Buyers’ Favourite Time to Shop’

I recently came across a relatively new shop by the name of Ush-op. I had to take a second look at the title to try and guess how to pronounce it. I’ve landed on “you sh op”, but there is something about “ushh op” that I like. I was firstly impressed that the shop, for its age, already existed on two continents – with the UK/Europe shop boasting a larger range of designs. Ush-op has big intentions! I like how this shop has started up and where Gary is going with his designs – the intricacy in TWIGGY and the pun of Treecycle. I caught up with Gary, the man behind Ush-op and asked him about his shop, Scotland and fizzy ducks. Gary in the interview:

Where are you from and where do you live now?

From and still living in East Kilboring, a small “polo mint city” just outside Glasgow with nothing much to do.

What do you do, other than t-shirts?

Well by day I am design engineer. But by night I philosophise, or let’s be honest I do nothing much really, just hang out and have fun.

What’s the story behind ush-op? continue reading ‘Ush-op: “For cool new sweet rad funky fresh clothing of sorts”’

I came across this great little graphic novel “Rebel With a Cause” by Kristian Labusga, which is competing for the Politicool Award in this year’s Bitfilm Festival. The film covers the journey a t-shirt takes throughout its life and the “ecological backpack” which a t-shirt ends up accumulating.

It’s just 200 grams of cotton – their story is reflected in their design and each one has its own little story to tell.

That story is much bigger than that initial quote suggests and this film visually takes us through the story of a shirt and the impact it has on our environment. I’ll let the film speak for itself and I invite any comments.

P.S. You can vote on this film and others in the category here.

Search engines and their users in Britain prefer co.uk, in Germany they like their .de and in France they love their .fr. For those who don’t know where they stand, a good old .com seems to do the trick.

Spreadshirt grew up under a .net and have therefore found themselves stranded in a strange land without, well, any.. land. This has got its positives, but also its negatives. The ease at which your shops and products are found within searches (for example using Google) is limited by your potential customer’s location. To try and shift the balance, we will be changing our top level domain and the link structure for the products from .net to .co.uk during the coming time. To make sure there are no casualties as we make this change, we’ve put together the following handy bits of information:

1. You can fix your country setting within your log in area. Your shop will then be reached via (for example) spreadshirt.co.uk and will be automatically optimised for the needs of search engines.

2. Old links will remain valid and visitors will be automatically forwarded to the new address.

Further information regarding this topic (e.g. why the whole change is worth it, and other mad ideas that we have planned) can be found in the Spreadshirt Forum.

As many of you saw, we had a big wooden box delivered a few weeks ago. We asked you to guess its contents and thought up some creative and amusing conspiracy theories about what (or who) was inside. So, we’ve unpacked it and you can read all about it in the forum or see it for yourself in this video with Simon.

When we said “soon” in yesterday’s post, we meant today. Our Spreaducation pages have covered how to create products for your shop and market it online. Most of the tips on how to market your online shop are, well, using online marketing. This is where many of your customers will be found and where online marketing methods will bring them directly into your shop without them having to leave the online sphere.

On the other hand, there is the fact that we (hopefully still!) spend most of our time offline. This is where an offline promotion can catch the attention of customers in the “real” world and bring them to the online one. When we say “offline promotion”, it is less about taking out a full page ad or standing out on the street and forcing a flyer into the hands of every passerby. We are thinking more about targeted use of flyers and stickers. We asked some of our partners in the forum about their experiences using flyers. Here are a few highlights:

1. Flyer Layout
Once you have come up with a concept, the next thing to consider is the flyer’s layout. Christbear’s opinion: It’s important that the flyer’s info is conveyed quickly while still making sure the flyer is pocketed.

The less advertising found on the front the better. A nice picture, a funny saying and always put the site’s address in small font at the bottom right (so it doesn’t get in the way). These are the flyers (or postcards) which I pocket, pin up on my fridge or set down on my desk for a couple of days. And these are the only flyers which I turn over and take a look at the other side.

2. Format and Printing
Quality over quantity: look for a good printer (we’ve had great experience with MOO), rather than worrying about the price. People will think twice about throwing away a high-quality flyer. And vice-versa – if a flyer looks like it was copied onto recycled paper, it is very likely to end up back in the recycling bin.

Popgarten shared the same opinion: continue reading ‘Five Fantastic Flyer Tips! Market your Online Shop Offline’

Congrats, congrats!

A little over a week ago we asked you, our partners, to create new products with the new September apparel for your shops and the Marketplace. Many of you took us up on this request and therefore automatically entered yourselves into our MOO Minicard raffle.

We’ve pulled 10 winners out of a spare tea pot and each of them will receive 1 free pack of MOO Minicards from us.

The winners are:

Lucie - Milatchek Shop
Bernd - Warten Shop
Katharina - Katharina’s Shop
Yasmin - Wiesnengerl Shop
Rene - Vakantietshirt Shop
Stephan - Stephan’s Shop
Iris -Ticeforheroes Shop
Dagmar - Exklusiveshirtandmore Shop
Becky - Wonkywear Shop
Robert - Thecasualmusician Shop

In order to claim your coupons for MOO, please write a short e-mail to Kathrin at ktl at Spreadshirt dot net.

If you are wondering how best to use the Minicards, we will be posting some offline marketing tips in the blog soon!

So, don’t wait too long to claim your coupon as they are only valid until 31st October 2009. You can start creating your Minicards here.

A big lorry rolled up to our doors recently and delivered this strange wooden box. We asked ourselves, “what in Spreadshirt’s name might be in there” – but, Simon was brave enough to drill some air holes. We’ll let you know what happened and provide more details about its contents soon (next week at the latest). In the meantime, if you have any ideas what it might concealed therein, we’d love to hear them and will lend an ear to all conspiracy theories.

P.S. If you are wondering what that funny question mark thingy is in the title, it’s an interrobang. Use them wisely.

You may count me among the lucky, my first name that is. In this edition of “Mark your Word” we are going to deal with first names which have also been submitted for word marks. To be clear, we are again dealing only with EU and German law.

You gather a few of your mates together, perhaps you are planning a stag or hen night, and you want to design some shirts for the occasion. You put the order in and what happens: some of them were rejected because those names have been entered as word marks. Poor John or Sandy (both word marks) would be (hypothetically) shirtless for the occasion. I can completely understand people getting up in arms: “That’s MY name. I can do with it what I want and no one can stop me!”

Yes and no.
continue reading ‘Mark your Word II – More on European Trademark Law’