At first glance Zoo&Co The Drawing Lounge might come across as a shirt shop for young’uns with its vibrantly colourful designs reminiscent of Saturday morning cartoons. Perhaps it was that very fact that made the shirts “grow” on me, and there is much more to discover and enjoy upon closer look. What really impressed me was their ability to create complex, colourful and detailed designs even with the “limitation” of 3 flex/flock colours. Shadows, outlines and contours in one colour, fillers in another and a third for accents are puzzled together seamlessly. For a relatively young shop, they have a great selection of animals, celebrity caricatures and creatures – all well integrated into a skillfully designed site. Zoo&Co in Interview:
continue reading ‘Colourful Critters, Creatures and Celebrities – Zoo&Co Interview’

Our CEO Jana Eggers recently met up with designer Daniel Casarella from Barking Irons in his New York studio. He revealed what designers should keep in mind when creating a good t-shirt design. He essentially points to three things which are important for a successful design:

1. Balance – how and where the parts of the design are placed on the shirt
2. Typography – the choice of font and its proper use to effectively communicate your message
3. Research – a good design should always be able to tell a story and stories are much easier to tell when you really know about the history behind it.

P.S. The Barking Irons apparel in our Exclusive Collection is still in stock and Summer is certain to bring along some new stuff.

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.

The Exclusive Line is here and we kick off our series here in the Blog with Barking Irons from New York. Founded by Daniel and Michael Casarella in 2003, the brand with the pistols (barking irons is an old fashioned term for pistol) is all about bringing a touch of american mythology to fashion. They say, each of their items is based on a character or a story, most probably from the 18th or 19th century.
In our Exclusive Line you’ll find 4 products (two shirts, one hoodie and one zipper), and we also have some more background information about the Barking Irons: Check out their blog, the New York Times article on “Brand Underground”, or the video featuring the Casarella brothers. We also did a short interview and asked Michael Casarella a few questions.

What is the barking irons brand about (one sentence)?

continue reading ‘Exclusive Line Spotlight #1: Barking Irons from New York’