The Exclusive Line is here and we kick off our series here in the Blog with Barking Irons from New York. Founded by Daniel and Michael Casarella in 2003, the brand with the pistols (barking irons is an old fashioned term for pistol) is all about bringing a touch of american mythology to fashion. They say, each of their items is based on a character or a story, most probably from the 18th or 19th century.
In our Exclusive Line you’ll find 4 products (two shirts, one hoodie and one zipper), and we also have some more background information about the Barking Irons: Check out their blog, the New York Times article on “Brand Underground”, or the video featuring the Casarella brothers. We also did a short interview and asked Michael Casarella a few questions.

What is the barking irons brand about (one sentence)?

Continue reading ‘Exclusive Line Spotlight #1: Barking Irons from New York’

More than four weeks to go to Christmas and yet, laFraise already start to put some mad decent goodies on the table to thank all designers and customers for a wicked ‘08.

For all graphic pros, they launched what is probably the t-shirt design contest with the biggets prize money ever (correct me if I´m wrong): the 15,000 - in words: fifteen thousand - Euro contest. That´s 12k GBP, folks! Deadline for submissions is December 1st. More details can be found in Jared´s art/design/fashion blog with a delicious strawberry flavour.

For all buyers, laFraise offers the following discounts in their shirt and hoodie filled online boutique:

Buy 2 T-Shirts, get 1 free with the voucher code santa2&1*
* = - 34% on all orders with 3 articles minimum.

Buy 4 T-Shirts, get 3 free with the voucher code santa4&3*
* = - 43% on all orders with 7 articles minimum.

Buy 6 T-Shirts, get 6 free with the voucher code santa6&6*
* = - 50% on all orders with 12 articles minimum.

And even though this promotion runs until the end of December, you better don´t wait too long with your order as all products are limited to editions of 500 pieces each.

We have mentioned before that suddenly it’s all about Christmas - and see what happened: the tie and the elk got some sisters and brothers, for example the shirt for biiig dogs!

Besides the dog-shirts, we added more colours for aprons and aprons for kids (in case grandma doesn’t want to have a lonesome cookie-session). Also, we are pretty sure we’ll meet them again this year: a range of people wearing (funny) christmas hats, no matter how much you try to avoid them (in Germany this fashion got a little overdone, especially on the christmas markets that traditionally take station in the city centres).

For the other end of our apparel, we have added some more special, limited items in our Exclusive Line. Continue reading ‘New and exclusively for Christmas Shopping’

Christmas is, as we know by experience, every year coming all at once and particularly when we are not prepared at all. This year’s Christmas Season was heralded at Spreadshirt with a dedicated brainstorming in the end of August (!) so that we are early enough thinking of some cool gift ideas for you. Meanwhile a lot has happened behind the curtains …

Our list of products has been extended, we are now offering typical Christmas accessories like the tie or the cuddly moose. Some more (and exclusive) will follow, more to be revealed soon. Moreover we have prepared special landinpage for individual christmas gifts  which points out some selected products from the marketplace. Besides there is the “Early Bird”-campaign for Shop Partners until November 20th which we traditionally use to motivate customers to order early. Not to forget a special section for Shoppartners to help you with marketing and offer material for downloads.

Especially our Photo Team was confronted with some interesting challenges: Starting with the question on where to get a tolerable Christmas tree from (simple answer: out of the wood of course!), over the choice of the models (and dogs as well) to the decoration of the scenery (what about a flokati, maybe?) there was a lot to organize. Continue reading ‘… and suddenly, it’s Christmas’

One week to go, and everybody is doing his part for the presidential election race - be it action figures, artworks, prints, dance-offs, pumpkins, or simply t-shirts! Since we believe in the t-shirt thing and the game called “wisdom of the crowds”, we joined the party and gathered some completely irrelevant, but interesting figures of our database for you.

Continue reading ‘The Spreadshirt Election Forecast’

We finally have launched the new marketplace and we wanted to give you a quick update about the most important changes: Continue reading ‘The new marketplace is live’

Just to remember: Our move is already history but what is a move without an appropriate house warming party? Right… A snail without its shell - possible but not the best solution.

Last Thursday, October 2nd, our new cafeteria and conference room in Leipzig, Germany, for one night lost their usual purpose and turned into a party place. And I must say: Not that bad change. As if the people reconstructing the building had only one thing in mind…

To explain the pictures below: Before Jana, Matthias and Michael opened the party with a speech and hence the buffet some of us used the possibility to press their own shirt during a production session. One - but not the only - advantage of having production and HQ located in the same building now. Besides really danceable music from DJ Ole as well as from Alex (yes, our IT-Alex!) and friend, good vibrations came from the drummers of Samba Pintada. Who wasn’t keen on dancing found some other distraction in playing Wii, table tennis, kicker or American Gladiator.

A special thanks should go to our IT barkeepers for sponsoring the bar and mixing 200 cocktails! And last but not least I (that´s Manuela, normally responsible for internal communications btw :-)) want to thank Anne for taking all the pictures from which you can see a little selection below. It was definitely fun partying with you!

Having been here for a few days now, I´d like to share some impressions from Spreadshirt moving out of the former HQ - the “Garage” - to the new one which is located in Leipzig, Germany, as well and just a 5-minute walk away from the former bulding:

And here´s some pictures from the brandnew offices:

September 21st is International Peace Day. Especially in regard of current developments, this seems to be a good occasion to spend some thoughts on politics. But besides worrying about old rivalries becoming new ones, there´s also a reason to celebrate - this year, the famous peace sign celebrates its 50th birthday.

That´s why Spreadshirt and laFraise join forces and launch a special shirt design competition around the topic of peace. The only requirement to take part is to incorporate the peace sign in the design. Not necessarely as the key visual, but it has to be in there somewhere.

The winner will get 1,500 EUR in cash and we´ll also give away some slots in the Spreadshirt end customer newsletter for those designers who not only submit their pieces to the European gallery of laFraise but to the Spreadshirt marketplace (please use “WorldPeaceDay08″ to tag submissions) as well.

Deadline for submissions  is September 12th. The winner will be announced on September 21st.

We have been waiting for this quite a long time: After solving final issues with the local authorities (such as TüV - which is an institution that checks the machine and worker’s safety) we yesterday kicked off Digital Direct Printing in Europe with a soft launch. Soft launch means: to minimize communication efforts and trouble shooting (if there is some ;)) we start in our own German T-Shirt designer first, with limited apparel only (currently the white Comfort Tee).  This gives us the time to react to any contingencies. Once we know it works fine, we will scale up and enable Digital Direct for more products and partners as well. If you are interested in the status and the progress of the soft launch, take a look at the Forum thread.