As you might have read from Robert’s post, we activated the new fonts at the beginning of August. 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 favorites. 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 entire font selection.

We have just scheduled more sessions of both the Spreadshirt Bootcamp and the Vector Graphic Webinar for September!

Spreadshirt Bootcamp - a quick guide to  getting your shop up and running
Wed, Sep 2, 2009 5:00 PM - 5:30 PM EDT
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/469962154

Wed, Sep 16, 2009 3:30 PM - 4:00 PM EDT
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/976312603

Wed, Sep 30, 2009 4:30 PM - 5:00 PM EDT
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/286458338

Vector Graphics
Thu, Sep 3, 2009 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM EDT
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/135109770

Fri, Sep 18, 2009 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM EDT
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/199065786

Wed, Sep 30, 2009 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM EDT
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/797728539

Check it out - Thrillist has a nice little post about LaFraise (Spreadshirt’s little sister - which offers some awesome t-shirt designs) which is now shipping t-shirts to the United States.

Also - if you are a subscriber to Dog Fancy look for a little shout out to Spreadshirt on page 18 of the October 2009 issue.

Well there is one good thing about summer coming to an end - we are cleaning out inventory to make room for - GASP - the holidays.  I know it is hard to think about christmas tress and snow when you are trying to think about how to get a few more trips to the swimming pool in before it is drained for the season.  But we are thinking ahead for you and in order to make some room on the shelves we have added 18 items to the Sale page - price reductions range from 12% to 87% - order now because when these items are gone, they are gone for good.

Check out the savings on these bamboo t-shirts - Women’s Jonano Fitted Tee,  Women’s Jonano Long Sleeve Hooded Tee & Men’s Jonano Long Sleeve Jersey Tee

Click here to go to the sale page.

It’s been burned, washed, stoned, dipped in acid, discarded and rediscovered, even shot.

I am probably not the only one out there who has trouble keeping up with their Google Reader. So when Tobias asked me if I had recently checked American Apparel’s “Daily Update” blog, I scrolled down to come across a link to NY Mag’s Fall fashion piece by Hugo Lindgren entitled T-Shirt by Darwin.

The article deals with the well-known and oft-mentioned James Dean-sian beginnings of the t-shirt, but focuses much on the recent developments of the tee, much of them coupled with new techniques and technology. Many have perhaps heard of stone-washing, garmet-dying, faux-fading, but the article goes into detail about some pretty cool and interesting techniques: continue reading ‘Evolution of the T-Shirt’

This Monday, laFraise unvealed the 12 designs which made it into the second round of the €15,000 Contest. From the 4,000 submissions, 800 were approved for the contest – I imagine choosing 12 from the 800 was certainly not the easiest of tasks. This group of 12 were chosen based on their score, the amount of pre-orders, the community’s comments, the design’s overall quality and laFraise’s personal taste. And now these 12 are up for another round of votes.

The winner of the contest will become the proud recipient of one of the biggest prizes ever awarded in t-shirt design contest history. When I first wrote about this contest last month, the prize money was at $20,995 - but, thanks to an even weaker dollar it has increased by $200! Here is your chance to take part in this historical event and perhaps help your favorite design win big-time. Time’s a-ticking - voting ends on Monday!

These finalists and other selected submissions will also be on display in the West Berlin Gallery from September 11th to 27th – printed on canvas - a great tribute to the often overlooked artistic value found in t-shirt design. The winning design will appear on a 47×47 in., the 11 other finalists on 32×32 in. and 40 additional contest designs on 16×16 in. canvases.

P.S. The design above is my favorite of the 12 - but, I could also imagine wearing this one. What are your favorites?

Temple who manages the Spreadshirt forums (and writes Temple’s Tips for the Shop Partner newsletter) just sent me a link to the new shipping FAQ page.  I hope that you find this helpful in figuring out how long it will take to process your order and have it shipped to you.  I am usually ordering things last minute and trying to figure out what level of shipping that I need to use.  Click on the screenshot of the page to visit the Shipping FAQ page.

We took some time today to look a through our statistics and see if we could come up with something useful for our designers. We certainly found exactly that when we looked at some of the searches that were done recently in the Marketplace. We found various search terms with a lot of searches where only a few purchases were made by the customers after getting the results.

This means that we need more designs and better products for these particular searches. Then, the Spreadshirt customers will have a better chance of finding what they want, which then would hopefully show up in your next commission payouts.

Here are some of the searches where we need more designs and products: continue reading ‘We want your designs! And we’ll tell you which ones’

So sorry if you had trouble joining us for the SpreadX on Socail Media today - we had some audio troubles and it looks like Twitter has had some troubles today too. (I guess we picked the wrong day to talk about social media :))

One of the things that I think is key to understanding and working with social media is understadning RSS - i highly reccomend the video RSS in Plain English by the Common Craft folks.  We watched it again this morning and discussed.  Deb who also works here at Spreadshirt found this video from the folks at Common Craft on Social Media - which is a really way of looking at social media.  I have been working on blogs and social media here at Spreadshirt for a few years now and I had never thought of explaining it this way.

What websites/videos have helped you to understand social media?  What social media tools have you used to help you with your Spreadshirt shop?

“Spread-X” is an internal training series which we run here at Spreadshirt where our employees spread their specialized knowledge to their fellow colleagues.

These events occur about once a month where the theme covered and participation is completely voluntary. Our fellow Spreaders in offices in Berlin, Paris, Boston and Greensburg can join in on the Spread-Xs via video conference.

Tomorrow at 11 a.m. EDT we will be having a Spread-X about the topic “Social Media” led by fellow blogger Tobias Huber who will be talking about how you can use Social Media to strengthen your brand.

We would therefore like to invite you to join in on this event and watch Tobias’ presentation as we stream it live on Twitcam. The link for the stream (where you can also comment via Twitter) will show up on www.twitter.com/spreadshirt shortly before the presentation starts. (That is, if it all works like we’ve imagined it to :-))

The presentation will cover the following topics:

• What is Social Media (about)?
• How does Social Media impact communication?
• Why is Spreadshirt using Social Media?
• How is Spreadshirt using Social Media?
• What do you have to do with it?
• What else do you want to know?

See you tomorrow!