Popcorn Prints is a relatively new shop on the Spreadshirt platform filled with custom shirts and clothing inspired by furry little friends. Starting with guinea pigs and hamsters, Louise plans to cover all household pets. These kind of niche shops can become successful, especially when it’s run by an enthusiast. We wanted to hear about her experiences using Spreadshirt and here are the answers we got!

What inspired or motivated you to open a shop and how long have you run the shop?

As a self-confessed guinea pig lover, I was looking around for a t-shirt for myself featuring guinea pigs and struggled to find one that I really liked. As it was just before Christmas 2011, I was also looking for a way to earn some extra money and when I landed on Spreadshirt’s site, it seemed a perfect way to solve two problems in one! The more I thought about it, the more I realized there was also scope to promote important messages and help to raise money for guinea pig charities.

How did you learn about Spreadshirt?

Once I hit on the idea of designing my own t-shirts, I read many reviews regarding the main t-shirt printing companies. Spreadshirt consistently appeared to outperform its competition on quality and reliability.

continue reading ‘Popcorn Prints – Clothing Inspired by Furry Little Friends’

Now, what is it that makes your shop and products so unique?

We’ve been aware of Spreadshirt for years now, and we knew that most shops offer quite interesting designs – but we wanted to come up with something special. We wanted to create t-shirts that did not only put the person wearing it in the limelight, but become the center of communication altogether. In other words, we were looking for ways that got people involved with the design on a t-shirt. Then came the day when we took part in a workshop on a new technology called “augmented reality”. This extended form of reality makes non-existing objects look real as they appear in the environment of real objects. The question was: could be put it on a t-shirt? By printing 3D objects on a t-shirt, we were able to shift the communication focus to the design itself, and the person wearing it became part of the scenery. This stimulates interaction between people commenting on the design and the guy in the t-shirt, who appears in a different form of reality. A lot of people take pictures with their smartphones or camera of people wearing our t-shirt designs, because they see something else in the design than the owner of the t-shirt. It would be interesting to put both parties in a room in front of a computer at a later point in time and ask them to comment on what they see – I’m sure you’d get completely different interpretations!

If you email your pics or put them on Facebook – e.g. as your new profile picture – you can receive those different reactions first hand. It’s definitely very interesting, and we’ve only ever got positive feedback. You should check it out yourself!

Since when have you been running your shop?

The AugmenTeeShirt shop has only been around since December 2011, but it has been met with great interest already, which is obviously fantastic.

continue reading ‘AugmenTeeShirt – Interview with Creators of Augmented Reality Shirts’

Some are already starting to look forward to the big sports event of the year: the Olympic Games in London. But before you start creating new designs to honor the event, we would like to direct your attention to the legal side of things. It is a bit tricky, so it’s really important to ensure that your shop and/or designs do not violate any copyrights.
continue reading ‘2012 – A Big Year in Sports, But be Careful’

Our winter print catalog is being printed up as we speak and they’ll soon be added to your orders at Spreadshirt. This time we decided to feature three YouTubers who have a Spreadshirt shop and see what they had to say about us. The image above is that very page from our catalog – and here’s what we had to say:

iJustine

iJustine is what they call an internet personality nowadays and, simply put, makes awesome videos on YouTube. Beautiful, funny and captivating, she belongs to the lifecasting and vlogging phenomenon that has grown out of YouTube in the past few years. With more than 400 videos, over 225 million views and the winner of a People’s Voice Webby Award in 2011, she is one of the most popular video bloggers out there.

• iJustine’s YouTube Channel
• iJustine’s T-Shirt Shop

Tobuscus

Tobuscus is the YouTube video channel of Toby Turner, an actor and comedian who makes downright funny videos for his more than 1 million subscribers. His videos have been viewed more than 200 million times, making him a comedic force amongst YouTubers. From Internet, to games, movies, music and much, much more, Tobuscus is not afraid to set his tone of humor to any topic.

• Tobuscus’ YouTube Channel
• Tobuscus’ T-Shirt Shop

FPSRussia

FPSRussia is the most-explosive YouTube video channel known to the Internet with over 280 million views. Dimitri, the one and only Professional Russian, introduces a vast assortment of firearms in his special Russian way. From 50 caliber machine guns, to automatic shotguns, flamethrowers and even a minigun, this YouTube channel will satiate your thirst for guns, ammo and destruction. Live vicariously through Dimitri and “have nice day”.

• FPSRussia’s YouTube Channel
• FPSRussia’s T-Shirt Shop

We also have a longer list with a selection of our Featured YouTube t-shirt shop partners.

Our Marketing Series on the blog is there to help you get your shops in shape and make them well-known. Now that we have about a month to go before the big holiday shopping season hits its highpoint, we’d like to highlight the following points that will help push your holiday sales:

1. Read Spreadshirt’s Shop Partner Marketing blog posts.

2. Add our new productsto your shop, e.g. pajama pants, backpacks or baseball caps for kids.

3. We’ll vectorize your graphics files! Use our graphics service to vectorize your pixel graphics for just $19.99 per design. Check out our Graphics Service now.

4. Optimize for search engines: e.g. shop names, enter description & meta data to increase your search-ability. Here’s where you can add your SEO meta for your shop

5. Add your Spreadshirt shop to Facebook with our app.

6. Inexpensive flyers, stickers and more. Discover new ways to promote your shop and grab a discount from Moo!

7. Christmas specials: see and seize the opportunities for you and your customers! Go to your user area news to learn more.

8. Delivery deadlines: don’t forget to inform your customers about the final date for deliveries. To make sure that they will get their presents in time, please refer to these dates.

9. Gift finder: react to design requests from Spreadshirt’s customers, and offer your designs for specific customer needs.

10. Enjoy the Holidays with your family!

In our last marketing message in September we mainly gave you a few tips as to how you can brush up your shop to be more customer-oriented. If you think your shop is up to scratch now, it is time you capitalized on placing it on the market!

Campaigns for your shop!

continue reading ‘Straight Marketing Tips in October for Shop Partners’

We made some changes to our design upload limits a couple of weeks ago. The changes are designed to simplify the upload process and give new partners a base to work from. Here are some more details on what this means for you:

Design Upload Limits Have been Raised

All Spreadshirt Shop Partners can initially upload 50 designs to their account. Once this initial 50 has been reached, Standard Partners can upload 5 more designs per day and Premium Partners can upload 50 more designs per day. There is no longer a difference between uploading vector or digital designs, each design upload counts towards your upload amount.

There is also no longer a correlation of upload limit to sales for Standard Partners. Standard partners had to rely on a number of sales to allow them to upload a further set of vector designs – and this simply wasn’t very productive. Our new automatic vector check robot is to thank for making this all possible. Digital designs uploads were unlimited for all partners, but now they are included in the daily and initial limit.

What are the advantages then of being a premium partner?

Premium Partners still have some great advantages over our Standard Partners. They are able to open a Designer Shop, send newsletters to their customers and open many shops from one account.

But, doesn’t this allow for more “junk” on the Marketplace?

This question is certainly valid, but these new limits also go hand in hard with our new Marketplace Guidelines. These guidelines will help ensure that the Marketplace is free from spammy designs (designs that aren’t suitable for the Marketplace, but are certainly valid for a Shop Partners shop).

So, now’s the time to start getting those Christmas and Holiday designs up on the platform!

Layer, layer, layer! ‘Tis the season to layer up for those Indian Summer Days and cool fall nights. My favorite combo: long sleeve, t-shirt on top and a hoodie just in case the temperature drops. Now’s the chance for you or your t-shirt shop’s customers to stock up on warmer clothing – and that means long sleeves! We’re offering $10 off to customers with at least one long sleeve product in their shopping cart (minimum order of $50).

The coupon code is: GOLDENFALL

Valid until next Monday, October 10th, 2011 at Spreadshirt and in all partner shops. Shop partners: get that marketing drum rolling and inform your customers!

Now that Summer is officially over, Christmas is the next big thing to look forward to! Start preparing for the biggest sales potential of the year by giving your shop the attention it deserves. The tips below should help you take the right steps towards generating even more sales through Christmas and beyond!

How many friends do you have?

Every single one of your friends is a potential – and FREE – source of advertising for you. Just give it a try: these days just about everyone has a Facebook account. The simplest thing to do is integrate your Spreadshirt Shop directly into your Facebook fan page. Here’s an example of how sushi-shirts’ shop looks. Don’t worry – it’s much easier than you think! Here’s how to integrate your Spreadshirt Shop into Facebook.

As soon as your custom t-shirts have been integrated into your shop’s fan page, you just need to ask your friends to “like” your shop and recommend it to their friends. This way, loads of people find out about it really quickly, and whenever you’ve got cool products on offer, your shop is bound to have plenty of traffic. But be careful: before you start drumming up all that attention, make sure your shop is in good shape. You can find more about changing the shop layout in our new Spreadshirt Partner Shop video tutorials.

Ever thought about flyers?

continue reading ‘Spreadshirt Shop Partners: Marketing ToDo’s This Fall’

It’s about time that Spreadshirt Shop Partners got their hands on the newly developed T-Shirt Designer! The first step has been taken and Premium Partners can now use the new Designer. The current version has some limitations and a bug can pop up here and there – but, it’s a beta version, so we ask you to be a little patient.

New Designer? Why?

We’ve learned a lot from our development and testing of the new T-Shirt Designer on our own platform. It converts better, is more stable, is faster and has a more modern look to it. These improvements certainly made sense.

We want to give you a chance to test it out, and to avoid taking any risks with your current Designer Shops, we’ve increased the Designer Shop limit to 5 shops (a permanent increase!). To use the new Designer, select it from the Shop Settings page in your account.

Changes and Limitations

The first version has a few limitations to it. For now, there will only be one color scheme that can’t be edited and doesn’t have widgets. This will change in the next phase that we are planning to release soon!

There is another important change for the management of designs. The category “My Designs” is no longer present. That means that the new designs won’t show all of the designs in a shop when it loads. Instead the first category is loaded and shown. Designs that are not put into a category therefor cannot be found.

Deep Links:
The current deep-link structure will continue to work with the new designer.

The Next Steps:
1. Ability to edit the color scheme and layout for the new Designer
2. Widgets and Features
3. A 650 pixel Designer will soon follow, a 800 pixel variant is also planned