Monday has come. The Monday on which we´d like to see you showing off your favourite shirts in a little blog parade. Above you see mine and I hope some of you will follow with webcam snapshots of yours.

From left to right, I´m deliberately not wearing Spreadshirts but some of my favourite shirts I´ve purchased externally in the last couple of days: a shirt from Nike, one from Beastin´ and one from Long.

I guess I don´t have to lose too many word about Nike besides that they really know how to play the T-shirt game. When it comes to the shirt above, I especially like how they combined a Flex print with a screen print. The Long shirt from London caught my eyes because of its extraordinarily long cut and the very very simple print. And the Beastin` shirt I got because I love black shirts and I loved how this one was presented in a 7 square meter popup store in Munich, Germany, which is only open for seven hours every seventh day of the week.

Alright, your time now: show us your favourite tees!

We said it once, and we´ll say it again: June 21st is International T-Shirt Day. In order to build up the celebration mood in advance, our good old friend Adam created the “Countdown to T-Shirt Day“. The idea is to have one T-shirt blog, T-shirt shop or T-shirt platform a day hosting a T-shirt related contest, sweepstake or promotion.

This is a plea to any T-shirt sites or blogs that want to

• host a daily contest
• offer a daily prize
• organize a activity/sale/coupon/promotion for tshirt day itself

to get in touch with Adam using the Tee Junction contact form.

We at Spreadshirt will kick off the countdown tomorrow with our “show off your favourite shirt blog safari”. You´re more than welcome to join.

The official start to summer is just a little less than a month away, well and warmly accompanied by the International T-Shirt Day.

We want to make sure that as many people catch wind of this celebration as possible and are able to plan their own festivities (some ideas which came to mind: Boston Tee Parties, Dry T-Shirt Contests, etc.). So that’s why we are starting off another Blog Safari with the theme “Favourite Shirt”. The idea would be to promote t-shirt designers you might know or expose up-and-coming t-shirt labels and get them some publicity which they might not normally get.

If you aren’t familiar with a Blog Safari, here’s how the whole thing works:

We are calling for all who love t-shirts and want to participate to publish a blog post next Monday (June 1st) with the headline: “My Favourite Shirt” which includes:

• A picture of you in your favourite shirt,
• A link to that shirt’s designer/shirt label/shop where you bought it (if the link is available).
• A reference that the International T-Shirt Day will be celebrated on June 21st 2009.

That means – grab your favourite tee out of the dirty laundry, take a pic with your webcam and if you are better at editing images than typing, go ahead and use the T-Shirt Day Banderole on your image.

It would be really great if you passed along the word so we can cover the widest selection of different shirt designs possible.

P.S. Above you can see me in my favourite Spreadshirt: one with a design from LA Lewis. If I had pictures of me in one of my many other favourites, I most likely would have linked to seen., Design By Humans, laFraise, Looky Looky, Top Dollar, Long Clothing or Rockers NYC. But, I hope that you guys are able to cover these and many more platforms and designers. After the click you will catch a glimpse of the Powley shirt which I am wearing today: continue reading ‘Blog Safari for International T-Shirt Day: My Favourite Shirt’

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″.

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.

Want to make your beloved customers a great offer for Valentine´s Day?
Include the following banners in your shop and allow them to save 14.2% on their Valentine´s Day presents by entering the voucher code HEART2K9.

See the banners after the jump.

continue reading ‘Valentine´s Day Campaign for Shop Partners’

Sleeveface is a blog specializing in pictures of “one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion”.
The concept is that successful that there´s even a best-of Sleeveface book (”Sleeveface - Be The Vinyl“) out now.
A few days ago, a picture popped up on Sleeveface which shows a woman wearing a CNN shirt (”‘Yes we did’, Obama crowd chants at rally“) and holding up up  Roger Daltrey-LP (Under A Raging Moon). What a nice story to kick-off the office season in 2009 :-).
Also nice: Bruce Springsteen, Jimi Hendrix oder Kylie Minogue.

I was really happy about an email from Tamiko Thiel last week. Tamiko runs the Mission Base Creations shop and told me that her legendary CM-1 shirts are now finally available for European customers, too.
CM-1? Mission Base? Tamiko Thiel?
Here´s the story: Tamiko was a member of the team that designed the CM-1 super computer at the MIT in the early 80s. The “Connection Machine 1″ - that´s the full name of the device - was “the first commercial computer designed expressly to work on simulating intelligence and life”.
Even before the team finished the design of the computer, Tamiko came up with a t-shirt logo which visualized the design principles of the CM-1. Tamiko: “In fact, we designed the CM-1 to look like this logo, thus making it the only supercomputer designed after a t-shirt!”
The shirt became famous as the “Feynman t-shirt” in the 90s, when Apple’s “Think different” campaign used a photo of Nobel physicist Richard Feynman wearing it.
See pictures of the shooting here.
Using Spreadshirt, Tamiko has reissued the legendary tee and now made it available in Europe, too. In case you still need Christmas presents for geeks, Apple fans and/or regular t-shirt lovers, the CM-1-Shirt should be a sureshot.

Tomorrow, December 1st, is Cyber Monday. Save 25% on your orders using the coupon code “CYBERBLOG” during checkout. Have fun buying shirts!