Dirty t-shirt? Get the knack of mastering how to rid your tees of stains and dirt. We have gathered 7 awesome tips for you on how to remove stains from your favourite pieces the gentle way. Let’s get right to it, here is a list of gentle stain removal and ecofriendly washing advice:
1. Use less washing powder. Using a lot doesn’t mean that your threads get cleaner. Alternatively, you can try wash balls. In Asian countries these offer a traditional way of washing clothes and hair. And they are environmentally sound.
2. Don’t use temperatures higher than 60°C. Your washing will probably get just as clean as when using 95°C. And you save energy as well.
3. Don’t wash on Mondays. No joke! They say that most people do their washing on Mondays, and this is why power charging, sewage works and pollution hit their highest peak then.

4. Stuff your washing machine as much as you can! If you can still get a hand between your clothes in the tumbler, the machine will have no problems coping with the wash load.
5. Offer spongey materials. Ideally put a white cloth beneath the stain which can absorb the stain’s substance.
6. Hide traces. You can avoid leaving borders behind by putting a kind of “liquid ring” around the stain.
7. Be careful with hot or boiling water. Especially protein-based stains will become permanent instead of getting removed.
Looking for more on easy stain removal? Here are some links for further reading.
Money Saving Wednesday…Vinegar (totallyready.com)
Wash-off: Fighting Sweat Stains with Baking Soda (craftzine.com)
Pizza joint gives staff t-shirts with the text of 1-star Yelp reviews (boingboing.net)
Have we forgotten anything? Share your magic stain removal skills with us and leave a comment.

It’s time to think spring…or at least wish for it’s early arrival. To kick start that spring feeling, here’s some fashion and color trends to look out for as the warmer months slowly approach. Glamour lists their most fashionable trends for the spring which includes; color blocking, the color tangerine, colorful camo and pepum skirts.
In regards to color, Pantone lists their annual spring color trends. Here is what you should be adding to your wardrobe; pastels such as pale yellows, pinks, mint and lilac and bolder tones such as tangerine, fuchsia and and violet. Mix in the neutrals of sand and shades of beige and your look will be complete.

Are you excited for spring?
Tell us what you look forward to wearing!

We are all licking our lips with anticipation of the two main sports events this year. In June, the 14th European Football Championships will be held in Poland and Ukraine, and the Olympic games will be hosted in London. But before you start creating new designs to honour the events, we would like to (again) direct your attention to the legal side of things. It is a bit tricky, so please ensure that your shop does not violate any copyrights.
continue reading ‘2012: A Year of Sports – and Designers Beware’

I know, I know. It’s just barely turned November and here we are in green and red talking about Christmas gifts. But, look at it this way: better to start thinking now than rushing around with a half-finished gift list in December. We thought we’d make this holiday shopping experience a bit easier for you and will lend a couple of helping hands – our Gift Finder will provide you with individualised custom gift ideas!

We not only countless custom clothing possibilities available on our platform, we’ll also help you find just the right one. There’s no supercomputer behind our Gift Finder using some IT guy’s algorithm to sort you out with “best-sellers”. No, no, we’ve got real humans elves that will search through our Marketplace by hand and even personalise a gift idea for you.

Our elves are at the ready until 30 November to provide you with custom gift ideas. Just like our Shirt DJ on Facebook, you’ll give us little info to help us along our search and we’ll send you a (non-binding) gift suggestion. So, give our Gift Finder a try – and perhaps you’ll have your Christmas list checked off before you even started creating one!

Yep, you read that correctly! Spreadshirt is now offering vectorisation of your pixel graphics! For those of you who don’t want to spend the time creating a vector graphic, or those who don’t feel too comfortable with a graphics programme, we present Graphics Service.

For £12.99 (or €14.95) per design we will take pixel graphics (.jpg, .png etc.) and create a printable vector graphic that meets all of our requirements. All you have to do upload your design on the Graphics Service page in the user area, go through checkout and we’ll take care of the dirty work. You’ll have the vector graphic waiting for your approval in the user area within 5 business days (we’ll inform you via email).

It’s as simple as that! Remember, the better the pixel graphic, the better the vectorised result! This way to Graphics Service!

P.S. For those of you reading this from the United States, not to worry – you’ll have Graphics Service on the .com platform soon!

Questions and answers – we’ve got plenty of both! While we have a Help page filled with questions and answers galore, there are a few we get quite often. And we’d like to give them a little room to breathe here.

How long will it take to get my order?

We produce your custom products on demand within 24-48 business hours. Then it gets shipped out. To find out how long it will take, you can use our handy delivery calculator. Simply choose your country from the list and find out when to expect your order.

How do commissions work?

There are two types of commission at Spreadshirt: design commission and shop-product commission. Designs first! When you upload a design on Spreadshirt and add it to the Marketplace, you can set a commission of up to €/£15 for it (€/£2 is the average for our most successful designers). When that design is sold (in the T-Shirt Designer, Marketplace or Shop), you earn the commission you set on that design.

The shop-product commission is exactly that – a commission you set on products in your own Spreadshirt shop. Our most successful shop partners set this commission between €/£5 and €/£8. Each time this product is sold, you earn the commission you’ve set on that product. It is therefore possible that a product in your shop has both a design and shop-product commission.

Find even more details about commissions in our article on how to earn money with Spreadshirt.

Why hasn’t my commission been paid out and how do payouts work?

Commissions are paid out quarterly. To be specific: at the end of April, July, October and January. If you have a German bank account, your payout must be at least €/£10. For transfers to European banks, you must have a payout of at least €/£50. continue reading ‘Top 10 Questions We Get Asked Over and Over Again’

Another installment of our T-Shirt Business Guest Post series – this time with some great tips from Peter Kowalski, the man behind Wordboner and Wordboner Store. He put together all of the important stuff you should know when starting a t-shirt business. We couldn’t have said it better. Big thanks to Peter and enjoy the read!

So you want to open a tee store online. Exciting, isn’t it? You probably don’t know what to start off with, so here you are, a couple of guidelines I would have loved to have had when I was opening my store.

Be original. The very first thing you should do is to figure out what you want to sell. Find a niche. Do something that’s never been done before. Don’t be one of many – be one of a kind. People won’t buy something they can go and buy someplace else. Originality sells. If you don’t know what you want to sell, then don’t just sell just anything. The ‘be original’ rule is the most important one simply because it applies to almost every aspect of your business. Always think outside the box. Remember: the minute you start swimming with the stream is the minute when you get lost in the crowd.

Packaging is (almost) everything. Now you know what you want to sell, but even the best idea might be worthless without an adequate packaging. By packaging, I mean the overall look of your brand: the name, colors, fonts, logos… all that jazz. Make sure your logo makes sense. Learn about the meanings of colors. Make sure your website doesn’t look like it was created in the 90s. Pick the right name for your company – only few companies have had success changing it later. It should be catchy, smart and memorable. Don’t be generic. The trick is to keep everything clean and simple without it looking boring. continue reading ‘How to Start an Online T-Shirt Business’

Internet ads are out there looking for you. Always getting the same shoe ad with high heels that your girlfriend looked at when using your computer? Do you feel like the Internet following you? I’m here to explain how it works – and what you can do about it. continue reading ‘Help! I’m being followed! How “Retargeting” Works’

The weather might not be a sign, but the calendar doesn’t lie. Spring is coming and the t-shirt season along with it! This is a great chance to get your shop in shape and fit by the time your customers are out there looking for tees. You can find some helpful tips in our Spreaducation section and here in the blog:

• How to use Google Adwords (Adwords Part 1)
• May Even More Traffic Rain Upon you (Adwords Part 2)
• 5 Tips to Market your Online Shop Offline with flyers
• How to Earn Money With Spreadshirt – Commissions Explained

But, we’re thinking that we aren’t the only ones that have something to say about the t-shirt business. That’s why we decided to turn the tables around a little. We want to let some of our partners have a say in things and share some of their own tips in different areas of the online t-shirt business. How do things work? For example, answers to questions like:

• How do I use CSS to embed a t-shirt shop in a website or blog?
• How do I create a vector design for plot printing?
• How do I use social media to market my shop online?
• What is the right price for my product?

Those are just a few ideas we thought of. What are you interested in learning? Perhaps you have some experience in a certain area that would be useful for other partners? We want you to share this with the world! Then please write us an email at stories at spreadshirt . net or leave a comment below.

So, what do you want to learn or share?!

It happened last August, for the first time in history. The average American Internet user (we’ll call him Joe) spent more time on Facebook than on the pages of Google’s network (including YouTube and Gmail).

Facebook alone not only has the same reach as Google, but also (according to its own numbers) more users. They say more than 500 million active users. What does “active” mean? Half of Facebook users log in every day!

These numbers are impressive and prove that it’s becoming more and more important for e-shops to be present on Facebook. Some of our Shop Partners have already had some great success (e.g. 11:11, Wordboner, Jerkass Clothing and Amorphia Apparel).

Why advertise on Facebook?

continue reading ‘Facebook Marketing: Give your Shop a Face!’