Cool. The Bivings Group, an internet strategy firm based out of Washington, DC, included Spreadshirt in their list “The Best Sites You Have Never Visited” for 2006. Thanks for the nice write up about Spreadshirt!

Spreadshirt.com. This truly is the best place to buy t-shirts online. This site gives you the power to design your own t-shirt, and provides a library of styles, text fonts, and images for you to use in your creation. You can also browse the creations of other t-shirt lovers, or import your own image to the system to use. This site is definitely fun– one-of-a-kind t-shirts make great gifts!

Leah brought in some Christmas cookies, since she baked 10 doz cookies, she had some to share with us.

Here is the recipe with the secret ingredient of orange juice.

Christmas cut-outs

1lb. powered sugar
1lb  butter, softened
4 eggs
3 Tbsp. milk
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 cup orange juice
approx. 6 cups flour

cream sugar and butter together, add eggs, milk, orange juice and soda.  Mix well. Add flour a little ata time, mixing well.  Chill in refrigerator overnight.  Roll out on floured board and cut out. (roll about 1/8-1/4 inch thick).  Bake 350 for 8 minutes. They will be white and look like they are not done.  Makes about 120 cookies.
frosting:  8 Tbsp. butter, softened,  4 cups powered sugar, 3 tsp. vanilla, 6 Tbsp. milk.  Mix together and frost. Add food coloring as desired.  Have fun!!

Check out this cool tool for displaying your Spreadshirt shop items on your site. The tool is still in development but the authors are looking for feedback.

Using python to parse spreadshirt feeds one can construst nice teasers or assemblies of offerings from different shops and display them on the net. Allows for “metashops”

read more | digg story

Pictures to come soon, but I didn’t want to wait any longer to say thanks to the good folks from Spreadshirt offices in Ireland. I blogged about our love of chocolate here (and here) and last week the chocolate arrived. A nice little package of tasty treats sent all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. Thanks!

Life On A Shirt is Jana’s (She is the CEO of Spreadshirt USA) blog.  Jana has some great posts not just about t-shirts, but about business and customer service.  Last week Jana gave an amazing presentation to the Pittsburgh Technology Council on the importance and value of learning from your customers.  I learned many things about how (and why) to interview customers from her presentation so I am really looking forward to reading  more from her blog.  I have added the feed from her blog to the sidebar on this blog.  Just scroll down until you see Life On A Shirt to see what she is writing about.

Here is a very nice blog post from The Far Reaches Blog about receiving their order from Spreadshirt. We are always happy hear from our customers. Positive (or negative) we appreciate your feedback. We are glad you like the t-shirts!

I just got the new Far Reaches t-shirts in the mail today, and I must say they look pretty good (did I even mention I was working on them?) In fact, I wasn’t expecting them to look anything as nice as they turned out. I rather thought they’d suck, but Spreadshirt.com does a pretty good job for print-on-demand. continue reading ‘We like feedback’

I was just reading some of the blogs I follow on customization and learned that the Time magazine person of the year for 2006 is not Hilary, George or Obama, it is YOU! Congratulations to the tech-saavy, creative you. You should be very proud, we are very proud of you.  At Spreadshirt we are focused on making it easier for you to create your own custom apparel.  So it is about time (pun intended) that Time give you some recognition. This Time cover story is very exciting, because now more people than ever before are going to learn a lot more about how much they can do and create with the help of the web.

If you have used Spreadshirt before than you know how easy it is to create your own apparel. If you are new to the “designed by you” tools, welcome and we hope you will give Spreadshirt a try.  As always we want to hear from you about how we can make Spreadshirt better. Please leave comments, visit the forums or contact us.
What do you think? 

I am actually really excited about this pick for person of the year. At least 3 times this weekend I saw the CNN clip about who will the person of the year be for 2006. A celebrity? A politician? I think this is a really great choice for person of the year and I hope that it will open up the conversation about people power to a much larger audience. What do you think about Time Magazine choice for person of the year? Good choice or is this just a convenient way for the editors of Time to not have to choose one person?

Here is another recipe from shop partner Linny (Check out Linny’s Spreadshirt shop - Duckpuddle).

Kit Kat Mousse Cake
Makes 24 servings

1/2 cup flour
1/2 of 1 pkg (18-20 oz.) refrigerated sugar cookie dough
1 cup large semi sweet chocolate chips such as the nestle mega morsels, divided
4  3/4 cups heavy cream divided
2 pkgs (11.5 oz each) milk chocolate chips
3 pkgs (5.6 oz each) 10 pk kitkat bars
1 tbs sugar

Preheat oven to 350. in a bowl knead flour into cookie dough until combined. stin in 2/3 cup large semi sweet chocolate chips until just combined. Coat 8″ round cake pan with cooking spray. press dough evenly into bottom of pan. bake 17-20 minutes or until edges are little browned. cool completely in pan.

In a large pot bring 1 cup of cream to a full boil. remove from heat, stir in milk chocolate chips until melted and smoothed. Cool until tepid. about 10 minutes.

In a bowl beat 3 cups cream until stiff peaks form. (which will make whipped cream) gently fold 1/2 of whipped cream into milk chocolate mixture to lighten. Fold in remaining whipped cream until just combined. refrigerate  mousse until ready to use.

In  pot melt remaining large semi sweet chocolate chips over low heat. transfer to bowl. line 9″ round cake pan with plastic wrap so that it hangs over the edges 3″. Center cookie in the pan. Break each kitkat into 2 long pieces along center indentation. dip 3/4″ of wide bottom side into chocolate. press against side of cookie next to pan. repeat until all sides of the pan has kitkats around it.

Cut 6 kit kats into 1/2″ pieces and coarsely chop remaining, set aside.

carefully spread 1/2 of the mousse over the cookie base. Sprinkle with reserved chopped kitkats. spread with reamining mousse  mounding towards the center.

wrap long rolled up piece of plastic wrap around outside of kitkats to help support sides. freeze until firm atleast 4 hrs or over nite. cover with plastic wrap after freezing for 1 hr. let stand in refrigerator for 15 - 20 minutes before serving.

in a bowl beat remaining cream with sugar until soft peaks form. if desired transfer into pastry bag fitted with a star tip. pipe rosettes or mound around the edge and in the center of cake. Garnish with reserved kit kat pieces.

Temple’s Tips: Tracking your holiday traffic.

We’ve added a new feature to the shop admin that will help you track your holiday traffic.

This new “Traffic” link can be found under the “Statistics” menu on the left side of your shop admin.  The new feature allows you to see how many page hits and orders you receive for the day, as well as your conversion rate.  You can export this data into a CSV file for your records.  This information will be detailed for the entire month and then condensed when the month is over.

Now you can also find statistics about the most recent links sending traffic to your site.  Premium partners are given the 100 most recent links used to get to their site, while Standard partners receive the 10 most recent links.  You can follow the link back to the page or search engine in order to see how customers are finding you.  Export the link data to a CSV file in order to keep a detailed record of your link hits.

One great way to keep people coming to your blog (or website) is to host a contest.  You could ask trivia questions or even ask people to link to your site.  Tracey and Matt’s Blog just wrapped up a 12 days of Christmas Contest.  Each day they posted a new question and the first person to email in the correct answer wins a prize.  With Spreadshirt it is very easy to manage the prizes, just find out what size shirt your winner would like and place an order shipping the shirt directly to the winner.  T-shirts with your logo are a  great prize because every time the winner wears their new t-shirt they are promoting your site.

I also like the link contest that Make Magazine held earlier this year, you can read more about that here.