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.

The early bird catches the worm – according to a trend study done by Google, more than two thirds of the Christmas gifts will be purchased in November. That’s just one of the good reasons to take part in our November Shop Partner promotion. With the voucher code “NOVEMBERSALE” you can get 15% off all products in Spreadshirt Partner Shops until 23rd November 2009. A quick look at Twitter, newsletters, blogs and the shops themselves tell me that many of you are already out there banging that marketing drum. Yeah!

If some of you shop partners are looking to spruce up the shop for the coming holiday season, you might have considered getting some top-selling holiday products in your shop. We thought we would take our last t-shirt Top 10 post and wrap it in some holiday shopping cheer. Here are the Top 10 products for Christmas – according to the bestselling items from November and December of 2008: continue reading ‘November Sale – with the Top 10 November Products’

May the best-selling shops win! We’ve prepared a little contest to help you boost up your shop sales before the holiday season really takes off. If you sell well in November, you could win some great prizes. We’ve also set up three different prize groups to make sure that even the smaller shops have the chance to win something. All you need is one sale, and you’ve qualified for a prize!

• 100+ sales: 5x exclusive newsletters to your customers (consultation with the winners, created and sent by Spreadshirt).
• 50-100 sales: 5x free flyers for your shop (our graphics team will create the flyers in consultation with you, your logo and your designs. We will then send the flyers to the 5 winners).
• 1-50 sales: 4x help re-designing your shop-layout (e.g. we will create graphics, banners or teasers specifically for your shop).

We will randomly select the corresponding amount of winners from all of the Shop Partners who fall into each of the categories. We will then contact them via e-mail.

Hold your horses – that’s not all … of course, we would like to help you increase your sales: a 15% off everything in your stores would be a good start, don’t you think? This promotion runs during the same time as the above-mentioned contest 9.11 – 23.11 (brilliant, aren’t we?) The voucher code is: NOVEMBERSALE.

This voucher code is valid for the entire contest period from 9th to 23rd November 2009 and gives your customers a 15% discount on all products. You are free to use the ad banner which our graphics team put together for you. You can find out more information about this promotion in the forum.

Happy sales!

To save the shop partners amongst us a little time in preparation for the upcoming holidays, our graphics team put together two lovely winter-holiday-snowy-and-sparkly background images for you.

You can simply download these from our Flickr page or right click and save the images. Then you can upload them to your user area and select it as your shop background under “Profile – Shops – Shop Layout”. If you go the extra step and set your theme to “Winter” under the “Selected Design” drop-down, you will be sure to get your customers whistling their way into the holiday shopping mood!

For those of you who peruse Spreadshirt’s home page daily might have come across a new tab in our navigation named “Featured Shops”. We thought that it would be a good idea to have a selection of shops which shows the unlimited possibilities, directions, niches and ways Spreadshirt partners use their shops to sell t-shirts. It’s a start – and we hope you like it!

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.

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’

It’s a little early to make the “Best of 2009″ list, but in case you want to shuffle and update your assortment for the upcoming weeks here are our bestsellers from January until end of September 2009:

1. Mens Classic Shirt

2. Women’s Classic Girlie Shirt

3. Men’s Slim Fit

4. Men’s Hooded Sweatshirt

5. Men’s AA Shirt

6. Men’s Contrast T

7. Men’s Retro Shirt

8. The Cooking Apron

9. Women’s Spaghetti Top

10. Men’s Summer Shirt

In regards of the colours: usually the most popular colours are black, white, blue and red. Of course what you offer always also depends on your niche, your target group - and your designs. But I hope this list is helpful to you in terms of which products to add.

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”’