© Utopia

A post by Anne Henneken, editor for Utopia, a German platform for “strategic consumption”. She´s also a columnist for jetzt.de which is a part of the “Sueddeutsche Zeitung” network.

D: Nice shirt!
U: Thanks. Can you hand me over the juice, please?
D: Here you go.
U: Thanks… ahh, sh**. Who makes up these stupid openings? That will never come out again…

In all of us, there´s a latent juice-on-the-pants-tilter, red-wine-spiller and coffee-fiddler. Creating stains is something everybody can do easily, fast and in almost every situation. People like Jackson Pollock even make art from it - but usually the spiller causes only anger and sometimes even insurance cases.

What are stains? Cleaning pros divide stains based on the elements which cause them. For example fat (Nutella, butter, shoe creme), proteins (blood, milk, garlic gravy) or pigments (juice). The hardest to remove stain are those which are made from a combination of these elements. A cacao-stain, therefore is a stain for semi-pros as it contains protein alongside dark color pigments and fat.

You can find a whole arsenal of stain removers in any given drug store. However, from an eco perspective, these aren´t very “clean”, as they often contain aggressive chemicals for bleaching and dissolving. These not only attack the fabrics but also pollute the environment. At the same time, there´s a fabric- and eco-friendly instrument to remove almost every stain out there. And it doesn´t hurt to know some of them:

Continue reading ‘Move and go away! Ways to get rid of stains the gentle way’

This got a little note in the newsletter, but its definetely worthy of a full post. A great new tool for producing vectors ready for your shops from a standard bmp image.

Its a project of Standford University and we’re really excited about it. Its web based and free, with really high quality results from our tests. For those of you with Illustrator or Coreldraw, this is highly recommended (the sites has comparisons between it and Adobe/Coral here).

http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/

Hi! Today a tip on the User-area and some News. When working in the Products section of your shop admin, always pay attention to the dropdown menu on the left, that has the options Show All, Marketplace, and Shop ######. To create or edit the products directly for your Shop, you simply select ‘Shop#####’. Here you can also create categories within your product range.

If you’re creating products within Show All-Focus, you can then add these products to Marketplace and Shop. This way you can manage your Halloween Stuff frighteningly efficient…

Did you know you can buy the products in your Shop without paying the commission? Under ‘Products’ select Show All in the dropdown menu. When you click the ‘Buy’ button on the right of the product, you only pay the base price without any added commission. But beware; products that are sold over the Show All focus are not counted as your own sales, and will not help you save up for any free vector uploads.

Don’t forget to upload scarily cool gallery images of you wearing your Halloween kit under ‘Shop ######’ and then selecting Upload Gallery image’ . Give your customers a shopping experience they’ll never forget.

Sorry for the lack of posts of late, I’ve been on holiday attending Latitude Festival (pics coming) and generally milling around England. I’ve returned to see that Spreadshirt has been mentioned several times (with quotes from our CEO Jana) in a recent article over at Entrepreneur.com, which you can read here

“T-shirts have become a blank canvas on which consumers are expressing their innermost thoughts, wants and needs–and they’ll gladly buy shirts that represent these personal statements. The time is right to express yourself, too, and make a profit while you’re at it.”

I found this via the indispensable t-shirtforums. If you’re not using it I highly recommend you check it out and connect with your peers. Theres over 8,500 really knowledgeable t-shirt sellers/enthusiasts over there. There is a Spreadshirt sub-board as well. I think we might have mentioned it here once or twice before.

This is an introduction to the new admin system. Some of the partners who tested the new beta asked us about the restructuring of the Shopadmin and why we structured a whole relaunch project around it.

Continue reading ‘The new Spreadshirt User area.’

Justin (t-shirt entrepreneur and spreadshirt shop-partner) from bluefish has written on a similar topic to my riding a viral wave post entitled “How to sell the next big thing”
Threadchat is shaping up to be a great blog, so go check it out, its full of informative posts about seo, interviews and insights.
Threadchat

How to sell the next big thing

Here is one for any new shop-partners, or those looking for a revision on the basics, the US team is putting on another of its popular webinar series:

This webinar will review the basics of setting up your shop, creating some products and how to share your shop with the world. The format for this webinar about 20 minutes of presentation from the Spreadshirt team, then an interactive 15 minutes of questions from you, the audience.

When: Wed May 16th, 3-4pm EST, 8pm-9pm (GMT), 7pm-8pm (ECT)

Reserve your virtual seat now: https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/870056749

Click here to view our past webinars.

The Puzzles will very soon be de-listed. Rumor has it that there are only 10 left in stock. That means:

a) They weren’t very popular, hence the delisting
b) The last one we ever produce will be a sort of collectors item

I’ve reserved the last one and we’ll give it away on the blog once the other nine have sold. Alternatively I’ll sell it on ebay and move to Hawaii, oh no wait the puzzles weren’t very popular, I’ll sell it and move to Harlow. On second thoughts, I’ll just give it away.

Recently we ran a little name our pirate contest. The winning name has been chosen. Guess it and you win the last puzzle (with the pirate on it). Here are some clues:
a) It’s more than a little nordic

b) Its managerial, Nancy.

Easy, peasy (for a brit).

If we think about the key components of a good selling store, I’d suggest they are:

Continue reading ‘Riding a viral wave - how to generate sales’

Individualitee shop just got a nice write up over at t-shirt alert. Tshirt blogs are a great place to get some traffic for your store and love for your designs. The writers of these get a lot of mails with requests to be featured though, so it might take some patience and even a little persistence to get coverage even if they really like your shop.

Some tips for getting featured:

Continue reading ‘Individualitee writeup @ t-shirt-alert’