Our treat to you this halloween season - FREE SHIPPING!
just use the following coupon code when you check out:

US$ TREAT29
CAD$ CADTREAT29

Offer ends October 26, 2009. Coupon code is valid for standard domestic shipping only. Orders shipping to Canada will receive $6.99 off the shipping total.

If you have a Spreadshirt shop - banners are available to help you promote this offer in the Banner Service section of your shop partner admin.

T-shirt:
Glow in the Dark Skulls by Purple Ibis

We have added a few more items to help you stay warm and fashionable this winter.  The following items are now available for you to customize or add to your shop.

1. Children’s Sweatpants - Available in Red, Navy and Black
2. Women’s V-Neck Hoodie - Available in White and Black

Today is Blog Action Day, a world-wide annual event where blogs focus on one specific issue to increase discussion about it within the community. This year’s Blog Action Day (with more than 8,000 participants) focuses on climate change, an issue which will affect us all, if it hasn’t started affecting us already.

Every product which is produced has an effect on the environment. T-shirts, and especially the cotton they are made from, are undeniably one of the many, many products contributing to climate change. This can be seen in the short video “Rebel with a Cause”, which I posted back in September. 200 grams of cotton can use up to 5 tons of resources throughout its life. That’s not what you normally think about every day when you put on your shirt. These resources are what we need to start considering when we consume just about anything.

1. Buy Organic Cotton T-Shirts

Our organic apparel assortment has grown to more than 10% of our entire product range. Buying organic means that less resources and chemicals are used in the production of the cotton. Companies like Continental with their EarthPositive products take this even an extra step further providing “wholly ethical” textiles: 100% organic, fair trade, low carbon during production, environmentally friendly materials, low water footprint and low carbon footprint (reduced by 90%).

2. Recycle Shirts

Every product has a life cycle and shirts are no exception. Your favorite shirt will get a hole, the print can fade (but, not flex or flock! ) or you simply don’t wear the shirt anymore. You don’t have to throw it away. Create a shirt blanket, shirtain, shirt seat, frame it or one of these 50 other t-shirt recycling ideas. Donate the shirt. Use it as a rag. Just don’t throw it away – it’s not good for your karma and not good for the environment.

3. Use less chemicals / Wear shirts more than once continue reading ‘5 Ways T-Shirts Can Fight Climate Change: Blog Action Day 2009′

Last month I attended the Steel City Big Pour - which is an annual beer tasting fundraiser for Construction Junction. Construction Junction is a pretty cool non profit organization here in Pittsburgh, PA that serves as a clearing house for extra building supplies an architectural elements. Looking for an old door or a clawfoot bath tub then Construction Junction is your place. They resell the extra materials - keeping them out of the landfill and helping DIY home owners save some money on their projects.  Over 30 breweries set up a tasting tables and distribute samples of beer during the Steel City Big Pour. There are also lots of tasty food from some of my favorite restaurants in Pittsburgh.

One of the first things I noticed after we walked in to the event were t-shirts. Brewers and drinkers love to wear their beer gear.

So here are a few of the photos of Beer Gear I snapped at the event - there are some great designs, uses of text, clever word play in these shirts.

Erie Brewing Company’s Scare Up an Eerie Craft Beer

continue reading ‘Some Creative Beer Gear from the Steel City Big Pour - T-shirts and T-shirt Totes too!’

Temple’s Tip is a regular feature of the monthly Shop Partner Newsletter. Click here to see previous Tips from Temple.

Have you seen the new SEO optimized link structure for your shop? Freshly released and ready for optimizing, the new link structure can help improve your shop’s SEO and provide a shortened link structure in general.

Perhaps you are wondering about your current links in your coded navigations, the endless forums, blogs, and sites you have promoted your shop on…what will happen to those links?!? No worries, all current links will redirect to the new structure, so no need to update your signatures or shop plugs, customers will be redirected to where you intended! Although, if you would like to use the new structure, then check out this handy tutorial. Still need more details? Catch up on the specifics in the Forum.

Another treat: purchase your designed products without your added commission! With the upcoming holidays, you may be looking to gift some of your creations - now that is totally commission free! (Perhaps you recall before only Shop-Product Commission was removed and only when purchasing in a particular area of your account.) Now, your added Design commission and Shop-Product commission are removed when purchasing your creations, as long as you are logged into your Spreadshirt account! Once logged in, you can visit your Product Tab or your shop directly, choose your size, add to cart, and the price shown will be less your commissions!

Don’t forget - this month is a payout month! Make sure your Payment and Tax information are fully filled in under Profile > Member Account > Financial Administration!

Now those are some sweet treats for October!
Temple

Image by BlueOut via Flickr

Are you looking for a little help in getting your shop started with Spreadshirt? I wanted to share some of the places you can get more information and some tips on setting up and running your Spreadshirt shop.

1. Spreadshirt Webinars - Webinars are a free, live presentation about different topics - all you need is your computer to participate. We have 2 different webinars (Spreadshirt Bootcamp and Vector Graphics 101) and we are working on some new ones that will launch in the future. Click here to see a list of upcoming webinars and to register to attend a future webinar.
2. Spreadshirt Forums - We have a very active forum where Shop Partners have shared lots of great ideas and tips. Check out the Shop Admin Forum and the HTML and Web Coders Advice Forum.
3. Shop Partner Newsletter - Each month we send out an info packed newsletter to shop partners including info on new products and tips for shop partners. Make sure you are subscribed in the Shop Admin section Your Spreadshirt->Profile->Subscriptions
4. Shop Partner Stories - see what some of the other shop partners are up to and how they get ideas for new designs. Check out the Shop Partner Stories here.
5. Tommy White’s Blog - Tommy White is the guy behind Nekkid Tee’s. Tommy has posted some great tutorials on his blog TommyWhite.com - check out his great tutorial on Organizing Your Spreadshirt Products and his Starting Grid for Spreadshirt Vectors. Thanks Tommy!

Know of some other Spreadshirt tutorials? Please share your favorites here.

I came across the Spreadshirt shop Fire Dan Hawkins from a link in a comments section. Dan Hawkins is the coach of the University of Colorado Buffalo in Boulder Colorado. I love seeing some of the t-shirts that football fans create and I wanted to point out this one because I think they have done some cool things with the text design on the back.

The front of the shirt says “Fire Dan Talkins” and the back says “You Can’t Spell exCUse with out CU” - I like the way they have incorporated the CU in to the text.

If you are looking for more info on CU football check out Denver Post Community Forum (one CU fan from Tulsa is ordering a t-shirt too). Other blogs about CU Football are The Ralphie Report and The CU Independent’s sport’s coverage.

Do you have a favorite football season t-shirt or game day outfit?

I don’t know what the weather is like where you are but here in Western PA we have officially hit cold weather season. Last week we had some beautiful, sunny, warm fall days but over the weekend - the rain rolled in and it is cold. I shed a few tears as I put on my boots yesterday. Flip flop weather is over. I came home yesterday and warmed up in my favorite sweatshirt - the distressed hoodie - mine is from the Crafster Shop and it says “knit fast, die warm”

So to help you stay warm as this chilly fall weather rolls in we bring you the Hoodie Sale! Save 15% on all hooded and zip hooded sweatshirts until October 4, 2009.

Coupon Codes:
USD$: HOOD9
CAD$: CADHOOD9
(Minimum $25.00 purchase is required. Valid for hooded and zip hooded sweatshirts only. Shipping costs are not included in discount.)

Hoodie History: you might want to check out the Hoodie Wikipedia page - there is a ton of info about the history of the hoodie there. continue reading ‘Hello Hoodie! Save 15% on all Hooded Sweatshirts’

Yesterday Problogger posted a list of the 10 most popular blog posts for Q3 2009. So I thought it would be interesting to see what have been the top 10 blog posts for the past month here at Spreadshirt. Here are the top 10 most read posts on the blog for the past 30 days:

1. Are you ready for some football? Say Hello to TO Tees and Ocho Cinco Gear
2. 100 Days, 100 Obama T-shirts
3. Celebrating Mediocrity
4. WordPress plug-in for Spreadshirt
5. GIVEAWAY - Create New Products - Win MOO Mini Cards!
6. Ribbed vs. Jersey Knit - What is the difference?
7. Jerkass Clothing Interview - The Man Behind the Humor
8. New Products Launched to Cover Your Legs, Arms and Neck
9. Five Fantastic Flyer Tips! Market your Online Shop Offline
10. World’s Funniest T-shirt Contest Winners

It is kind of cool to see that people are stopping by the blog to read about all kinds of different things.  We have been reading lots of blogs and talking about how we can improve this blog to be more useful to you.  What would you like to see more of here on the blog?  What stories and announcements are helpful?  What could you live with out?

Are there other company blogs that you think are great?  Some of our favorites include Timbuk2 and Southwest Airlines.  What company blogs do you like to read?

We decided to focus this month’s Trend Report on the shopping days and times which our buyers in Europe and North America really love to click on that buy button. Some of differences between North Americans and Europeans are well known, but perhaps parts of these findings support those differences (siestas?) or provide us with insights (buying at work?).

North Americans best like to part from their money in the afternoon, whereas Europeans tend to hold on to their hard-earned cash well into the evening. The one exception in Europe are the Italians, who strongly increase their buying from 3 to 4 p.m. – nothing like a nice shirt purchase after a siesta, I guess. The average European really gets into the buying mood between 8 and 9 p.m.

You’ll find even more detailed shopping times for the U.S. and a closer look at Europe after the click.
continue reading ‘Trend Report: Favorite Times to Shop for Shirts’