After Andy from HYA listed 50 great ways to recycle your old shirts with some awesome examples of other uses of the tee, we thought we’d take the camera around the office to see what we’ve experimented with. Here is a collection of our ideas on the extensive possibilities a shirt offers, other than, of course, wearing it. Now with that “Holiday-Which-Must-Not-Yet-Be-Named” soon approaching, you might want to impress with some nifty shirt-recycling gift ideas.

A)Wall Shirt Print continue reading ‘Do it Yourself: A Different Take on Shirt Customisation’

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’

Many of you have probably uploaded a vector graphic at one point or another in your Spreadshirt life. If this much is true you might have also received a short e-mail in your inbox at one point with the following text:

Hello {FIRSTNAME},
Unfortunately, we cannot accept your uploaded design “{DESIGN_NAME}” (Design ID: {DESIGN_ID}) for the following reason: […]

A description of one of the 11 rejection reasons would follow with a short explanation of how you should rework your design so that we can print it. Sometimes this information didn’t completely clear up the confusion (let alone the frustration). So, we thought we would dig deeper into the reasons for rejection and stick this content into one of our more popular FAQs: “My design for plot printing has been rejected. Why?” This article also fits in well with our video of Micha and Klaus and is also linked in our rejection e-mails.

This new-and-improved FAQ now has a listed overview of the types of rejection for vector designs, sorted according to frequency. Smack-dab at the top is the first commandment “Thou shalt not create lines which are too thin”, a.k.a the 1.5 mm rule, followed by the “Thou shalt not leave curves open” and “Thou shalt not use too many anchor points”.

What’s also new is that we show and explain exactly what would happen if we were to print such a rejected design on a shirt. We’ve added some graphics to illustrate this point, which hopefully makes it clear why we can get pretty strict about the plot printing requirements. Here’s to fewer rejections!

For more information and answers to your vector and pixel graphics questions, check out our aptly named category.

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!

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!

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!

© Utopia

A post by Anne Henneken, editor for Utopia, a German platform for “strategic consumption”. She´s also a columnist for jetzt.de which is a part of the “Sueddeutsche Zeitung” network.

D: Nice shirt!
U: Thanks. Can you hand me over the juice, please?
D: Here you go.
U: Thanks… ahh, sh**. Who makes up these stupid openings? That will never come out again…

In all of us, there´s a latent juice-on-the-pants-tilter, red-wine-spiller and coffee-fiddler. Creating stains is something everybody can do easily, fast and in almost every situation. People like Jackson Pollock even make art from it - but usually the spiller causes only anger and sometimes even insurance cases.

What are stains? Cleaning pros divide stains based on the elements which cause them. For example fat (Nutella, butter, shoe creme), proteins (blood, milk, garlic gravy) or pigments (juice). The hardest to remove stain are those which are made from a combination of these elements. A cacao-stain, therefore is a stain for semi-pros as it contains protein alongside dark color pigments and fat.

You can find a whole arsenal of stain removers in any given drug store. However, from an eco perspective, these aren´t very “clean”, as they often contain aggressive chemicals for bleaching and dissolving. These not only attack the fabrics but also pollute the environment. At the same time, there´s a fabric- and eco-friendly instrument to remove almost every stain out there. And it doesn´t hurt to know some of them:

continue reading ‘Move and go away! Ways to get rid of stains the gentle way’

This got a little note in the newsletter, but its definetely worthy of a full post. A great new tool for producing vectors ready for your shops from a standard bmp image.

Its a project of Standford University and we’re really excited about it. Its web based and free, with really high quality results from our tests. For those of you with Illustrator or Coreldraw, this is highly recommended (the sites has comparisons between it and Adobe/Coral here).

http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/

Hi! Today a tip on the User-area and some News. When working in the Products section of your shop admin, always pay attention to the dropdown menu on the left, that has the options Show All, Marketplace, and Shop ######. To create or edit the products directly for your Shop, you simply select ‘Shop#####’. Here you can also create categories within your product range.

If you’re creating products within Show All-Focus, you can then add these products to Marketplace and Shop. This way you can manage your Halloween Stuff frighteningly efficient…

Did you know you can buy the products in your Shop without paying the commission? Under ‘Products’ select Show All in the dropdown menu. When you click the ‘Buy’ button on the right of the product, you only pay the base price without any added commission. But beware; products that are sold over the Show All focus are not counted as your own sales, and will not help you save up for any free vector uploads.

Don’t forget to upload scarily cool gallery images of you wearing your Halloween kit under ‘Shop ######’ and then selecting Upload Gallery image’ . Give your customers a shopping experience they’ll never forget.

Sorry for the lack of posts of late, I’ve been on holiday attending Latitude Festival (pics coming) and generally milling around England. I’ve returned to see that Spreadshirt has been mentioned several times (with quotes from our CEO Jana) in a recent article over at Entrepreneur.com, which you can read here

“T-shirts have become a blank canvas on which consumers are expressing their innermost thoughts, wants and needs–and they’ll gladly buy shirts that represent these personal statements. The time is right to express yourself, too, and make a profit while you’re at it.”

I found this via the indispensable t-shirtforums. If you’re not using it I highly recommend you check it out and connect with your peers. Theres over 8,500 really knowledgeable t-shirt sellers/enthusiasts over there. There is a Spreadshirt sub-board as well. I think we might have mentioned it here once or twice before.