Local Celebrity: It’s just business

I got the Local Celebrity newsletter today announcing two new shirts and looking at one of them the first thing I thought was: I’ve seen that before. And I had. For those of you who don’t know the reference it is from a Flight of the Conchords song. Watch the following video to understand why these t-shirts are clever. I chose this title because I have been thinking of the Sopranos recently and it is like something Tony would say. It’s just business, nothing personal.

Anyway the new t-shirt from Local Celebrity is not actually a new idea. Very similar versions are already available (for quite a while) on two college humor sites: 6 Dollar Shirts and Nerdy Shirts.

I am a little disappointed by Local Celebrity. I would have thought that they have more integrity but … well…whaddya gonna do? Anyway, what do you think? Leave comments below.

Is this t-shirt overstepping the mark?

T-Shirt Hell, as you probably know by now, is famous for its offensive t-shirts and while I haven’t found any that personally offend me there are plenty of shirts there that I would not wear for fear of offending someone else. Today’s new t-shirt is one of those and this is one that I have wonder who in the hell could get away with wearing it. I guess only someone with Downs. What do you think? Feel free to comment below.

Threadless tees offer a new perspective

Again I apologize for the lack of posts recently. I hope to return to the normal pace but I realize that it is unlikely that it will happen anytime soon. I have a lot on my plate at the moment with three jobs and a baby on the way. I have other things going on that take my time too but I won’t bore you with the details. I will tell you about two new shirts while I sit here smugly thinking to myself what a clever title this post has.

The first is Solitary Dream Pt2 by Budi Satria Kwan aka Radiomode and on top of the clever illustration I just like the colors.

The second t-shirt is similar in theme in that it is turning our preconceived conceptions upside down. In this one the puppets are really the puppet masters. I think we can expect this from Bert though although I think he should have had a more evil smile on his face. It’s by Aled Lewis and seems to be a Sesame Street parody.

T-Shirt Hell – Setting the record straight

Now that T-Shirt Hell is saying goodbye to the world it has gotten more attention from t-shirt bloggers than usual. I think I probably mentioned T-Shirt Hell more than any other blog and the reason is that they had many many great tees. Yes, they had t-shirts that might be offensive to people from various backgrounds but they also had many downright funny and well-designed t-shirts including some of the best parody t-shirts on the web and this stemmed from their willingness to push the envelope. Below are a few of the best. They have all been featured on the T-Shirt Review before.

I made this post because I don’t want T-Shirt Hell to be remembered just for it’s offensive tees. Check out my previous T-Shirt Hell posts.

If you are interested in getting some T-Shirt Hell t-shirts you’d better hurry as they are closing February 10th.

Threadpit and the $6 Shirts

You have probably seen the ads for these $6 shirts somewhere recently. I saw them quite a bit even on my own blog and of course being me I had to check them out. I thought they looked familiar and our friends at Tee Junction also seemed to think the tees seemed familiar. They compared them to the generic movie referencing fare that you can expect to find at Busted Tees or Snorg Tees but I thought there was more. It wasn’t that the t-shirts were similar to what you could find elsewhere I was sure that they were the same as you could find elsewhere and that elsewhere was Threadpit.

My first thought was that 6DollarShirts.com were ripping off Threadpit designs and selling them. Perhaps getting away with it because the designs themselves were maybe copied off some movie or TV show. Then I noticed a banner add for $6 T-Shirts and 10 for $50 but the URL was Threadpit. At Threadpit I couldn’t find any $6 shirts so I did a little investigating and found that many of the tees sold at 6DollarShirts.com are also being sold at Threadpit. At Threadpit they are $14.95 though.

My guess is that Threadpit have found a way to produce ultra cheap shirts and sell them for super low prices while still making a profit but also don’t want to lose out on the sales they were getting for their reasonably priced shirts. I guess the message here is that before you buy at Threadpit you might want to check out 6DollarShirts.com first. Below is an example of a shirt available on both sites.

Sensational T-Shirt Entrepreneur

I came across this article this morning on the internets and found it quite interesting because my image and probably most everyone’s image of the t-shirt entrepreneur is some young guy who doesn’t want to get a real job. It’s hard to say for sure but it seems that the owner of this t-shirt store, Shirts 4  Seniors is of retirement age. That’s pretty cool. It goes to show that almost anyone can be a successful t-shirt entrepreneur.

Annoyed by the “cranky old grandpa” t-shirts she saw on the street Kay Presto decided to create her own t-shirts for seniors that have a more positive spin. So, she created the Digni-Tee (c) “I’M A SENSATIONAL SENIOR!” apparel line. It basically consists of t-shirts, golf shirts and sweatshirts, all white, in various sizes, with the same “I’M A SENSATIONAL SENIOR!” design. I think they would make great gifts for the old-fogies in your life. That is, of course, if they have accepted the fact that they are old. I might lose my scalp if I gave one to my mother. Unfortunately they only ship to the US.

Link: Shirts 4 Seniors

Fifty Thousand Shirts Shipped

On December 20th I received an email from MerchSquad saying that my order had shipped. A bit of investigation told me that the order was for two tees from the charity t-shirt web site FiftyThousandShirts.com I’m a fan of charity tees, assuming they are wellpay designed, because it’s not like you are just giving money away. You are also generating business, income and sometimes even creating new jobs. You also get to show off how charitable you are and the chicks really dig that. (Jokes!)

I first mentioned this website back on May 24th when I put my name down for two shirts but it wasn’t until August that they officially opened the store. By that time, of course, the publicity and news of the tragic situation in China had died down. I guess the interest also died down but clearly interest was never as high as Steve Paterson, the creator of the project, had hoped. The idea was to sell 50,000 shirts and send about $1 million dollars in aid to the victims of the earthquake that devastated China earlier this year. The total number of people who put their names down for shirts didn’t reach 750 which is quite short of the hoped for figure of 50,000. In reality though, the number of people who put their names down and the number of people who actually paid for the tee was also way off, at least when I spoke to Steve Paterson on the phone. I guess one reason could be the state of the economy had drastically changed since this project had started and people were more worried about putting food on their own table and paying their own rent.

Anyway, I paid for my t-shirts on August 15th and when a month had rolled around with no sign of a shirt I wanted to know the status. There were no updates on the site so on September 30th I shot off an email to see what was going on.

It has been over a month and we still haven’t received our shirts. We were wondering what the delay was and when should we expect the shirts to arrive.

There was no reply so on October 19th I send another very similar email to which there was no reply either. Nor was there an update on the site.

It has been nearly two months and we still haven’t received our shirts. We were wondering what the delay was and when should we expect the shirts to arrive.

This was a little frustrating. I decided to call them but because of the time difference it was difficult to find the right time to call. Find it I did though, early one morning before work I got through to Mr. Paterson. He wasn’t very apologetic but he explained that he was waiting for 1,000 or 2,000 ( I forget exactly) shirts to be ordered before he would get the first batch printed. It was here he told me that of the people who put their names down for a shirt only a few actually paid. I can understand that and I wouldn’t have minded waiting longer if I had to. The thing that annoyed me was that he neither replied to my emails or updated the website to let us know what was going on.  In fact, there was no update, that I can see, on the website from August 11th until finally the shipping notice was published on December 15th. At this time, they also announced that the store had closed.

It’s been a long time coming, but the shirts should arrive from the printer to MerchSquad on Dec 17th, and be shipped out by the 18th! Thanks to everyone for your support and your patience through this process. I know many of you have been wondering where your shirts are… and hopefully you’ll have them as an early Christmas present!

Also, you may have noticed that we closed the store. I am saddened that we needed to end the project before reaching our goal, but it looks like I simply bit off more than I could chew. In reality, it did not make sense to allow orders to trickle in, one or two at a time – as printing costs would have been too high to allow for much to be dontated.

Please check in after the Holidays, as I’ll be posting a little info about how much, and to whom we’ll be donating the profits. And again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who supported this project. You are a blessing.

The t-shirts haven’t arrived yet but when they do I will make another post and hopefully include the details from the donation they have promised above. Although I won’t hold my breath waiting for them.

My advice for anyone in any business is to keep the lines of communication open. If you are having some problems that will affect your customers in any way, you should let them know. In many cases they will be understanding. On the other hand people get very frustrated and angry when they are ignored.

More on Zazzle’s UK Site

OK, so I didn’t do enough research before I made my last post about Zazzle’s recent news. I always seem to forget to check the forum announcements which is where they placed the FAQ about the new UK site. I do blame Zazzle partly because of their featureless forum though.

Zazzle’s new UK Site – FAQ

You should click on the link above to read the finer details but below are the points I felt are the most significant.

1. The items are still being distributed from the US but prices on the Zazzle.co.uk site are inclusive of VAT (Value Added Tax) and customs duties.
2. For shopkeepers, if you are earning your royalties and earnings in Dollars, and your product is sold on the Zazzle.co.uk website to a customer who pays Pounds, the earnings for that sale are converted to Dollars and paid in Dollars and vice versa.
3. At the moment the earnings for each domain will appear separately and to check you will need to log into the respective domains but they are working on a soon to be released consolidated account system which will hopefully also give us the ability to consolidate different stores rather than just .com and .co.uk versions of the same store. (I said hopefully because I hope so but I couldn’t find any indication that this will be the case.)
4. Referrals: This is a point I am very unhappy about as Zazzle are not living up to their promise here. If you refer someone to the zazzle.com but they end up buying from zazzle.co.uk, which I assume anyone ordering from Europe will do, we will not get the referral commission even though Zazzle clearly says “You get a 15% referral fee on every product sold, even if it’s not your content!” on their website (link). So we are immediately losing referral income here and when Zazzle creates even more localized sites, such as Canada and Australia we will also lose those commissions too.

In this case I think that Cafepress seem to have installed a much superior localization system as it doesn’t look like affiliates will lose commission because people shopped in a different currency. Zazzle has only recently introduced their improved Zazzle Seller Incentive Program but now I bet a lot of people are going to lose the incentive to promote Zazzle items.

Referrals are domain-specific, so someone who clicks on a referral on a link to zazzle.com won’t get referral for purchases made on zazzle.co.uk because the user cookies are different for each domain.

Local Celebrity Election Tee Clearance

Local Celebrity are trying to get rid of the their Obama and McCain t-shirts before the election completely destroys the market for them. They are selling two Barack Obama and two John McCain t-shirts for $10 dollars each and if you use the coupon code CRACKKILLS you can get a further discount of 20% effectively making your t-shirt cost $8 plus shipping. To be nonest I am not all that impressed with these t-shirts although I do like the other tees they have on offer. I am pretty sure though that I will never buy anything from this store as I live in Japan and Local Celebrity charge $50 for overseas shipping. Yes, as hard to be believe as that is, it is true. That would probably make these $8 tees the most expensive tees I ever bought.

These offers are surely limited so if you live in the United States or if you live overseas and have more money than sense don’t waste any time getting over there.

Funny but not Funny

There is a minor scandal brewing about a t-shirt that has been printed by a member of the Denver Police. I really can see the humor in the t-shirt. It is funny, no doubt about it. It is one of those classic double meaning jokes. The problem is that the joke is in extremely bad taste. The t-shirt says “We get up early to beat the crowds.” with a picture of a policeman holding a truncheon. Even the artwork is pretty good.

There are people arguing for freedom of speech and I totally agree that they have the right to produce these t-shirts but I don’t think that this should be a rights issue but rather an issue of right, as in right verses wrong. Perhaps if the police didn’t actually beat anyone at the DNC it would be fine but they did and this t-shirt appears to be celebrating the fact. It would be like if Enron directors started selling t-shirts “We took your jobs, your savings and destroyed your lives.  Enron Bankruptcy 2001.” I think there would be 20,000 people and their supporters pretty angry about it.

If someone else had created this t-shirt, and I think this t-shirt has been done before, it would definitely have been more palatable but I don’t think that the people who delivered these beatings should make light of it.

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