The T-Shirt Vault is open!

Yet another t-shirt contest site has opened but this is definitely one with a difference. In the T-Shirt Vault all submitted designs will go on sale and the designers will received $3 for every shirt sold. When a tee is sold it’s sold on a DTG printer and shipped out, like a POD.  It’s not very clear but I think that the t-shirt that sells the most in a month will get the grand prize of $5000 on top of the royalties. Then $3000, $1500, $1000, and $500 respectively for 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th place. They are pretty decent prizes. $3 royalties per shirt is pretty crap but the chance to win those prizes might make it worth.

Well, again I feel I just throw my 2 cents in. The site design is nice enough but it’s a shop and they haven’t made that obvious enough on the front page. There are some pretty good designs in there but lots of mediocre ones too and you have to do a lot of clicking to see them in any detail. I don’t know how many people will bother with that when there are a million t-shirt sites out there with easy navigation and better presentation. I think the T-Shirt Vault will have a difficult time pulling it off as that is a lot of prize money they have to pay out which means they have to sell a hell of a lot of t-shirts just to cover the cost. I think that they might break even around the 1000 t-shirt mark which is pretty tough for a new unknown brand.

Also they are printing DTG rather than screenprinting which a lot of people have doubts about. That said I have some awesome DTG t-shirts and I think at this stage it just depends on the quality of the DTG printer.

I do have some concerns about the lack of information and Terms and Conditions on the website too. There are also quite a few broken links. Hopefully it will be sorted out pretty soon.

Having said that I encourage you to check out the T-Shirt Vault and if you like some t-shirts you will be supporting designers by buying them as well as being part of this new experimental business model.

Obamao T-Shirts Banned in China

Chinese t-shirt designer created a Obama t-shirt that combined the face of President Barack

Obama with the uniform and classic image of Chairman Mao but when Obama went to China the Chinese authorities shut it down. Some say that they didn’t want Obama depicted as a Communist. (I’m sure FOX News are having a field day with it. The may also be happy about their president’s effigy being burned.)

I have a feeling that Obama wouldn’t mind and would be more pissed off by the fact that there are serious freedom of speech issues in China that selling tees with his mug on them.

$5 Tees in Closing Down Sale at District Cotton

I have only mentioned District Cotton once before on this site and that was to tell you about a sale they were having. Perhaps if I had promoted them more they would be thriving today. (Oh, if my blog were so powerful.) Anyway this will more than likely be their last sale as they are closing down. Well, if you can find a tee in your size will you will be able to get a nice bargain. Check it out before it’s gone.

Via: Hide Your Arms

Flying Mouse about to take off

Many of you may be familiar with Flying Mouse. He is a prolific designer with extraordinary talent and as evidenced in his designs, originality, imagination and a quirky sense of humor. He has been very successful at Threadless with about 17 prints from his original account (Flying Mouse) and 7 more from his Flying Mouse 365 account. Yes, he has two accounts at Threadless. The second account, Flying Mouse 365 was a challenge that he set himself. The intention is to submit a new design to Threadless every day for  a year. As I write this design 180 has completed scoring.

During this challenge though, he appeared to come to a standstill but this is not because he gave up. Instead he has decided to bypass the competition circuit and produce and sell his own t-shirts. He is practically an institution anyway and has an enormous fan base so why not. It worked for Glenn Jones, it’ll probably work for Flying Mouse too.

The new site will be open on November 11th if all goes according to schedule and the idea is to have a new design featured every day for a full year (hence Flying Mouse 365), and that pretty much means that every week there will be 7 new products available! These 7 new products will be available for a quick pre-sale at a lower price for the entire week (a great reason to visit his store every week) and once the week ends there will be 7 newer products to replace them and so on… They will also have a permanent store that will feature the most-loved products.

I am pretty excited about the launch of this store because Flying Mouse designs are just fun. This is an amazing project when you think about it. A new tee every day for a year. That is similar to what Threadless provides.

Well the store doesn’t open until November 11th as I mentioned but The T-Shirt Review readers are very lucky because Flying Mouse has sent over some previews of what will probably be the first week of t-shirts. Yes, 7 tees. Check them out below.

ShirtFight over but not out

ShirtFight have just posted the winner of their final bout. For those of you who don’t know, ShirtFight is a t-shirt contest site that just appeared a couple of months ago. They held a weekly themed competition and attracted great designers many of whom made designs especially for these contests. They seemed to be doing quite well until a few weeks ago when they announced that they would be increasing the time between contests for financial reasons. They later announced that they would be doing away with the contest altogether. I would guess that sales were not quite as high as they had hoped and these contests were scrapped to stave off financial ruin.

Over at ShirtFight there was a great community and I think they probably put a lot of effort into making their site a success but of course success isn’t easy especially in this industry where hundreds, if not thousands of shops are vying for the same customers and that doesn’t include the POD shopkeepers like me. I often read Jud’s (co-owner of ShirtFight) posts about how he created ShirtFight “to showcase and support really awesome artists and their work” and things like that and in that he has been successful. As I said, he built a cool community and has developed strong relationships with designers. This may also have been ShirtFight’s failing though as he should really have been developing stronger relationships with customers and spending his time marketing his products.

I follow a lot of tee blogs and I didn’t see ShirtFight mentioned often even though they had some very sweet tees designed by popular designers. Of course if, as in my case, they promised to send a tee and didn’t (twice) that might have pissed off the bloggers. We can be a fickle bunch. (I myself have recently been snubbed by Andy at HYA for reasons undetermined.) But hey I’m still posting about ShirtFight regardless. It’s all about the shirt, right?

Another thing I noticed is that even thought they have an affiliate program, apart from an announcement, they seem to be keeping it a secret. Where is the link on their site to the affiliate program? I don’t know. We bloggers like to make some money too even if it is barely enough to pay for hosting. Let’s know about it.

Anyway, perhaps now that ShirtFight’s contest is over it will leave Jud and Miss Ettie time to really market their stuff. They have a good product and a cool new website coming (tomorrow?) so all they need to do is to get the word out. Here is my shout out for them.

LaFraise Reloaded

After what seems like months of teasing laFraise has finally released their new website but don’t worry, you will still recognize it. The new LaFraise is very fresh looking and more importantly the pages load faster. Maybe German was available before but I never noticed it before so now LaFraise is available in three languages: German, French and English.

LaFraise have also launched a new affiliate program but I wonder what will happen to the Brouzoufs system. I hope it is not like at Uneetee where when they cut off their native referral system decided not to tell their users and decided not to pay out to the people who generated sales for them. At least that’s what they did in my case. But more about that later. For how head over to LaFraise and check it out.

LaFraise Ships to the US and Canada

This is a great move for laFraise and is sure to make a lot of tee aficionados happy. There had been talk about LaFraise selling their tees across the pond before but it didn’t seem to work out but today’s announcement is the answer to a lot of people’s prayers. Granted, they are shallow t-shirt related prayers but a prayer is a prayer.

Just recently I said that even though LaFraise didn’t ship to the US I was going to feature more of their t-shirts here. Basically because they have great t-shirts and great designers but now I no longer have to feel sorry that my US readers can’t get their hands on them because they can.

WatchTeeV – Videos about T-Shirts

At WatchTeeV you will find a growing collection of videos about t-shirts. Some of them are about designing tees, some about selling them and some of them are just about t-shirts. It is an extremely slick site and very hazardous to people with a limited time budget because it is so easy to get sucked into watching just another three minute video.

I know what you are saying, I don’t need to go to that website to watch videos about t-shirts. I can watch all the videos I need at The T-Shirt Review. OK…I know you are not even thinking that and from the looks of WatchTeeV, there may be no better place  for people with either and aversion to reading or a short attention span to learn about t-shirts. The site is well designed and easy to navigate.

And there is more to come. This is what Adam has to say about the future of WatchTeeV: We are also looking to do a weekly live broadcast in which we take guests, give classes on designing, Q and A sessions with established and upcoming T-Company owners and much more!

Go have fun.

Cafepress and Upsold Collaboration

As some of you must know by now, Rude Retro is based in Japan. Because of that I have of course checked out some Japanese PODs. Even if I haven’t gotten off my lazy ass and actually opened an account with one and uploaded the designs. All the ones I have seen are pretty ugly or don’t have a good commission structure so I didn’t want to waste my time. Anyway I was checking out Upsold.com a few days ago when I noticed the Cafepress logo. A quick scan tells me that Upsold are going to be releasing all their designs into the Cafepress marketplace. I have mixed feelings about that of course as I have a Japanese themed Cafepress store which will no doubt suffer from the sudden influx of 1.4 million designs from Japanese designers. Unless Upsold reciprocated by selling Cafepress designs on their site I don’t think there is any real benefit for current shopkeepers. I’m not so sure that Upsold could handle 140 million Cafepress designs though.

According to their press release (Japanese pdf) they are starting off the collaboration by affiliating Cafepress on the Upsold site which is cool for us shopkeepers. It may bring in some more sales. I thought it was interesting that they are using cpshop as the script to sell Cafepress items on their site. This press release from Upsold was issued on March 17th 2009.

Update:  According to Leslie Nuccio at Cafepress, “Just a heads-up that the Upsold deal is purely an affiliate deal. That press release is incorrect, and we’re working to get it fixed.
If they choose to upload designs, they’d do it the same way any other Shopkeeper would. However, the deal we did was just an affiliate deal (they’re the affiliate).”

That may alleviate some worries but Cafepress shopkeepers have more pressing concerns, methinks.

TeeFury Preview

I haven’t seen this happen before but I received a preview of the next three shirts at TeeFury from Teevil, the evil TeeFury bird. (A little bird told me.) It’s a bit weird but I guess it is an attempt to get more sales at the site. The first tee which has already gone on sale is by Wotto.

The second tee is a parody of the infamous Shepard Fairey Obama poster. It’s a mashup of current theme of the month Zombies. Although Zombies are like, sooo last month IMHO…like ya know.

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