As we mentioned in the last newsletter and blog post, we have a contest running for Shop Partners during November. You still have the chance to qualify to win one of three great prizes. Give your marketing drum a good pang, whack, bang and get some new customers into your shop. Shops with even one sale are automatically entered into the contest. You can find some great tips on how to market your shop on our Spreaducation pages or in our Forum, where you can exchange and test ideas with Spreadshirt employees and other Shop Partners.

Important information for your customers: Christmas Ordering Deadlines 2009
Santa’s elves aren’t the only ones working hard in the weeks up to Christmas: we also have quite the amount of products to produce by hand. As the production times tend to increase this time of year, we would ask you to inform your customers about our ordering deadlines so they know that they will get their gifts before 25th December. There’s a brilliant little chart in our FAQ section where you can find information about all EU countries.

The ordering deadlines for the UK are:
Standard Shipping: order must be made before 10:59 a.m. (GMT) on 17th December.
Express Shipping: order must be made before 10:59 p.m. (GMT) on 20th December.

The tabloid newspaper with the largest circulation in the UK has 40 years of news reporting filled with both success and controversy. The Sun is certainly most famous for its headlines, which can range anywhere from witty to outrageous, can be pertinent to current events or even be seen as blatantly offensive. You might have a clear memory of some of the more iconic headlines plastered across their front page, or maybe seen one framed for its humour on the wall of your local pub.

These headlines are what we talk about at lunch or on the coffee break. They strike up conversation (and perhaps argument) as they mark current news events and opinion. Is that not in essence what t-shirts sometimes do? The Sun and Spreadshirt thought the same. I have been asked countless times about the shirts I wear and I gladly invite this intrigue and conversation: and now you can do the same with The Sun Shop shirts!

You can find a wide range of their famous front page headlines from their very first print (Horse Dope Sensation) up through their September 2009 headline about the Labour Party (Labour’s Lost it). My favourite is certainly the “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster” shirt. Check ‘em out:

Their shop is split into three styles: a Fashion Shop where you get the famous headlines graphically represented; the Front Page Shop where you can find shirts with the exact front page from famous headlines; or you can choose shirts from the Classic Shop with a bold headline font.

Have fun reliving and wearing some of the most famous (and infamous) headlines in British newspaper history.

Where were you 20 years ago today? At my ripe age of 8 on 9th November 1989, I can only remember sitting down at dinner with the TV on and my dad saying very earnestly: “Pay very close attention, this is a very important day in history.” We then watched people standing and cheering on top of a wall that really didn’t have much meaning to me at the time. Despite my father’s words, I wasn’t up to par on my world politics and I continued on with my careless and free 8-year-old life.

Now that I am living in East Germany, hanging out and working with those whose lives were most certainly changed 20 years ago, it’s a great time to look back and reminisce on the past two decades and beyond. Of course, we would take a look and see what our Marketplace has to offer:

If you are looking for a good overview of the 20 year anniversary, you are sure to find plenty on the BBC or Guardian websites. I would also point you in the direction of some great East German jokes which were collected by West German spies. My favourite:

“What would happen if the desert became communist? Nothing for a while, and then there would be a sand shortage.”

Where were you 20 years ago?

If any of you had a chance to visit your shop today, you might have noticed something different in the link which appears in your browser. The replacement of top-level domains (i.e. .de, .fr, .co.uk, etc.) as well as the change to the link went live today. Here’s a little breakdown for you:

Top-Level Domains:
You can select under which top-level domain your shop(s) should be accessible. Simply see under “Languages and Currency” and select the corresponding locations for each shop. If you would like to continue to have your shop accessible under .net, simply select “EU”.

Link Structure:
Changes in this area will enable an improved searchability of your shop, for example through Google searches, as well as a shortened general link structure (which looks much better!). To illustrate, let us look for example at the design page of your shop:
Old structure: shopname.spreadshirt.net/en/GB/Shop/Designs/index
New structure: shopname.spreadshirt.co.uk/shop/designs

Some important notes:

• Old links will still work! Basically all existing links will be redirected to the new URL structure (for the Nerds among us: with redirect 301).
• Please be aware that if you use tracking tools (i.e. Google Analytics) and have chosen to change your top-level domain, we also recommend that you also change the corresponding code. Simply check that you have changed the link to your shop from the original “.net/en/GB/Index/index”.
• The easiest way to create links to your standard shop is to simply copy the URL which now appears from the browser’s address field.

More information about these changes can be found in the Spreadshirt Forum.

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’

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.

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.

Kristina flew in from the States over the weekend and we didn’t waste any time getting her on camera to talk about apparel. After a quick introduction, she enlightens us about the decision process for selecting new products for our Apparel Assortment. As a special bonus, I had her introduce two new gift items which we are introducing for the holiday season. I’ve already said too much! See for yourselves:

As you might have read from Robert’s and my posts, we activated the new fonts at the beginning of the month. The addition of these new fonts has brought more quality, variety and design possibilities to both customers and Shop Partners – and the feedback so far has confirmed this. That’s the good news.

Now on to the bad news. As we mentioned when unveiling the new fonts, for various reasons we will be deactivating 32 of the old fonts tomorrow, September 1st. Here they are (take a deep breath): Signature, Gael A, Times, Verdana, Courier New, Compacta, Dom, City, Sherwood, Storybook, American Typewriter, Chinese Rocks, Letter Gothic, Lithograph, Sonic, Square, Swiss, Kabel, Bremen, Creamepuff, Miniskip, B790-Deco, Greasy Spoon, Trikot College, Trikot Nr.1, Trikot 3D, JP Mincho, JP Gothic, Desyrel, Aktuelle, Gregs Hand, Santas Sleigh Full.

I’ll remind you all once again – no reason to panic: “This doesn’t mean that any of your current designs we will be butchered by the arrival of a new font. Even the ability to edit your current products will still be possible with a font that is deactivated.”

This does mean, however, that today is your last chance to order products with these fonts from the T-Shirt Designer or to create products with them for your shop. Get ‘em while you can! I am personally going to miss Greg’s Hand …, did I just write that? But, really it was one of my favourites. Bello Script is really starting to grow on me and Freestyle Script LT does the trick, too.

P.S. Check out our Font Book for an overview of our font range.