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.
I'm a Sensational Senior Apparel Line modelled by sensational seniors
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 well 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 payed 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.
You should click on the link above to read the finer details but below are the points I felt are the most significant.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.)
- 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.
Yet Another T-Shirt Search Engine
The guys at ShirtSeek.com told me about their site about a week ago but I didn’t want to post about it too quickly as some people might think that this is a blog mainly about t-shirt search engines after having just made posts about Teenormous and PleaseDressMe. Actually this is my favorite of the three search engines partly because it doesn’t discriminate against PODs such as Cafepress and Zazzle. Whats more though, is that not only can you submit your shirts or other people’s shirts you can also share in the affiliate profits generated by this site. Can it get any better than that? Well. Yes. You can also rate and comment on the designs.
The design is very simple but I like it. The only criticism I have is that I don’t like the way the designs look on the little pencilled shirts. I think showing the actual t-shirt would look much better and also help us choose our shirts faster.
I don’t know how many shirts they have in their database but hopefully the guys will step up and let us know.
Well my litmus test is once again Obama.
Shirtseek: 24
Teenormous: 32
PleaseDressMe: 16
Teenormous - Another T-Shirt Search Engine
I believe this t-shirt engine was actually released a few days before PleaseDressme. Teenormous, like PleaseDressMe, is also not really a search engine but a database of t-shirts manually selected by the site owners. They do have almost 15,000 shirts in that database though which is pretty impressive.
A search for Obama turned up 30 results which is much better than PleaseDressme’s 12 (3 when I originally checked). Also for t-shirt shop owners there is a way to submit a feed of your t-shirts to get included in the directory quickly but Cafepress owners, don’t get too excited, more than likely you can’t have your t-shirts listed there. They may make exceptions if you have your own domain and some great designs though.
I complained about PleaseDressMe’s site design but at least they had design. This site looks like it was just thrown together. It is functional though and that is the important thing.
PleaseDressMe T-Shirt Search
A search engine for t-shirts is a pretty good idea. It saves you from having to scan the products of various websites to find what you are looking for and you may even discover a few new t-shirt sites in the process. In my opinion though, search engines should be comprehensive and this one is far from comprehensive. For example when I searched “Obama” the results showed only three results when everyone knows that there is a huge selection and that that is it growing everyday. Of course it is a new site and I’m sure the Obama results will steadily increase.
I don’t know how tees are added to the search engine but my guess is that they are manually added which means that it will never be a comprehensive list. They are using a lot of popular t-shirt sites like T-Shirt Hell, Snorg Tees and Busted Tees. I suspect that POD t-shirts will never be added making this t-shirt more of an exclusive directory in the form of a search engine.
They provide a wiget for bloggers etc. to place on their site and everytime someone purchases something after linking from the widget the blogger will be put in a draw for a free t-shirt. Pretty cool. The site seems to be monetized by using the affiliate codes for various sites. Perhaps the free t-shirts are from places like Threadless that don’t have a cash affiliate program.
Anyway, the concept is pretty cool but unfortunately nobody had told the site designers that the Web 2.0 look is over and it’s too soon for it to be retro.
Zazzle’s Rebranding and the New Look
I got a bit of a surprise when I was checking out my stores a few minutes ago. One second I was looking at the familiar sight of the what has just become old Zazzle branded page and the next I am looking at a darker vision. Do I like the new look? Yes, I think so. Am I happy with the change? No. Reasons below.
Zazzle’s explanation for the change is… I’ll just post an excerpt below.
Zazzle is much less interested in promoting itself than it is in promoting our users and the content they generate. This overhaul of Zazzle’s identity is intended to create a brand that allows us to step back from the limelight so that your content takes the center stage.
If this is true how come the new Zazzle branding takes up more space than the old one? How come the new logo is bolder than the old one? Why is the Zazzle marketplace search bar featured more prominently than before? As mentioned in a previous post called 10 ways to improve Zazzle, I think that Zazzle has too much branding and too many leaks from our stores and now the leak that I hate most of all, the Zazzle marketplace search, is sure to draw more of our customers away from our stores than ever before. If Zazzle really wanted our content to take center stage they would really reduce the size of their branding and get rid of those leaks. I believe with Printfection and Spreadshirt you can remove branding totally from the page but don’t quote me on that. Even Cafepress’ branding is subtle compared to Zazzle’s.
That’s the branding and the search bar but there is also the web design here. A simple rule is to keep important content high on the screen but our content has just been pushed a little further down to make room for Zazzle’s new look and search bar. If Zazzle really wanted to promote us and our content why is our content being pushed down the screen?
This is the old branding below and what the header used to look like.
This is the new header with the new logo, look and more prominent search bar.
The Zazzle home page looks very good though and is much more attractive than the previous text heavy version. I prefer the image based home page but that is just a visual thing. I thought that the changeover was for SEO purposes. I wonder why the about face.
15 Awful Mistakes Made by Designers
The good folks over at GoMediaZine have just completed their three part series entitled 15 Awful Mistakes Made by Designers in the Music & Apparel Industry. These articles are essential reading, as is most of their website, for wannabe designers. They interviewed respected t-shirt designers such as Jimiyo and shared the wisdom borne from their own past experiences. If you study these articles you are sure to save yourself money and time as well as reducing potential stress.
Link: Awful Mistakes Part 1
Link: Awful Mistakes Part 2
Link: Awful Mistakes Part 3
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