Colorful Critters, Creatures and Celebrities – Zoo&Co Interview

At first glance Zoo&Co The Drawing Lounge might come across as a shirt shop for young’uns with its vibrantly colorful 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, colorful and detailed designs even with the “limitation” of 3 flex/flock colors. Shadows, outlines and contours in one color, 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:

What inspired or motivated you to open a shop and how long have you run the shop?
Our main motivation was to become our own bosses and to do what we really wanted to do and not what we had to. We wanted to express ourselves and to spend our time drawing. In fact, we thought that it was a pity not to have fun while working, so we opened our own shop. At the beginning (second half of 2008), we opened our first shop just to know how it would be, but once when we were happy with Spreadshirt’s quality and customer service we decided to become Premium members (January 2009). We thought that it was important to have both shops (USA and Europe), so this is what we did. We opened both shops and uploaded our drawings. Some months later, we began to build our own website and embed our shops. Although this hasn’t been a piece of cake, we have managed to launch them and here we are!

How did you learn about Spreadshirt?
Actually it was a workmate who told us about Spreadshirt after he saw our drawings. He thought that it would be a good idea to launch ourselves into this market because we had already worked on t-shirt creation and it would be pretty easy for us to create a website as we are Web designers.

How much time do you invest in your shop? Do you create designs yourself?
Yes, we are the creators of Zoo&co’s designs and website. As a matter of fact, we’ve been drawing since we can hold a pencil in our hands, so we thought that as we had a pretty big collection of characters and drawings, we could give them a home and that’s how Zoo&co was born!
We usually spend 8 hrs a day working on our shop, but the positive thing of this kind of job is that if you don’t feel like working, you just don’t have to do it! You go to the beach instead!

Where and how do you market your shop and make it well known?
We began by wearing our own t-shits everywhere we could (actually, we were our first clients). This way people would talk to their friends about our designs and their friends to their friends and so on. Word of mouth, you know.
We have also sent an email to all of our buddies and workmates letting them know about our shop, when we’ll be open and giving them our URL. Once we had done this, we created a Fans page on Facebook and Twitter.
Now, we keep advertising our shops on the net and building strong partnerships! I think you can just never stop marketing your shop.

Who do you think your customers are?
Mainly the 18 to 40 year-old crowd

If you think back from the “opening” of your shop up to now, what would be the most important insight that you would give a newcomer?
Do things as simple as you can. Sometimes you want to do too many things at one time and this only makes life harder. Keep it simple, and you’ll have more chances to get them right!

Have you ever seen someone you don’t know walking around with one of your t-shirts on?
Yes! We were so happy that we were like suspended in the air. We had butterflies in our stomachs and were very proud of ourselves!

What do you do for a living, or better said: what do you do when you are not fiddling around with your shop?
I’m a graphic and web designer and my wife, who gives me a hand, is a translator.

If you were a t-shirt, how would you look?
We have never asked ourselves this question, but I think we would have a very cheerful look, with tons of colors and very nice drawings. We would be made of high quality materials and very original.

Which question have you always wanted to be asked and what is the answer?
Where will you be six months from now?
We will be sun bathing somewhere on a heavenly island (with an Internet connection of course) managing our Spreadshirt shop