Review: Crooked Monkey

I received a nice Christmas present from Crooked Monkey. Thank you very much. They sent over two tees which I am going to take a little time talking about. There has been a Crooked Monkey review here before but it was a while back so I’ll just let you know that I first became interested in Crooked Monkey while watching Weeds. Silas, one of the main characters, wore the I’m not a gardener, I just like hoes.” t-shirt. I now wear it too.

The first tee is one of those This is how I roll tees and it is a nice take on what has almost become a genre. The colors are simple and retro with a cool vintage effect. The shirt is a little long, which is how my better half likes them. The baby bump prevents her from wearing it though. If I were to criticize the shirt in anyway I’d have to say that they material is a little light, maybe even flimsy. Probably something I think about because the temperature has plummeted recently.

There is also the branding on the shoulder but at least it’s not text. In fact I think, for some people, it may even be part of the charm of this tee.

The next tee is mens white and I have to admit that I am pretty impressed with it. It is one of the nicest white graphic tees I have seen in a while. It shows that Crooked Monkey are branching out. It’s not just about humor. It’s about style. Apart from the candy that was sent though. That was so bad it must have been a joke.

Review: Torsopants go moo

Well, we received our first and last tee from Torsopants. This is not because of the quality of the tee or any problems with Torsopants. It is simply because Torsopants closed its doors on December 23rd. The tee we received, a ladies top is nice quality. We felt the ink was a little thick but not uncomfortably so and I suspect it is intentional because it adds a pretty cool rough effect to the design which itself is a little rough. It’s as if it were drawn by a child who wasn’t able to keep inside the lines when he was coloring it in. This t-shirt is a very typical joke on Torsopants. Basically a picture with contradictory text.  Another example would have been a flag of one country with the name of another country. I’d like to say that Torsopants will be sorely missed but I think it will soon be forgotten. Bye bye Torsopants.

Update: This t-shirt is now available on T-Shirt Hell, along with many other Torsopants tees.

POD: Wordans

Yes, another POD review. I am a POD shopkeeper after all, so these things do interest me. The guys from Wordans contacted me to let me know about their site and ask me to do a review. Reviewing a POD is not like reviewing a regular t-shirt store. You really have to get in there and get your hands dirty. You need to play around with all the features and try to figure out how it works. It’s fun but time consuming. Well, I better get down to it then.

Wordans is a fairly new enterprise having opened in October of 2007, if I am correct. I had come across it a few times before but it didn’t make much of an impression on me. I imagine they have made some changes though since I had last looked at it because it is a pretty reasonable POD with lots of potential. By potential, I mean potential for shopkeepers like me to make money.

For the shopper it has an interface more like Spreadshirt than Cafepress or Zazzle. Maybe that is where they drew their inspiration from. First you choose the design and then are give the opportunity to choose the shirt it goes on and you can even choose the print location and add text if you want. They have a neat little product designer to help you do this. Unfortunately though, you can only add one image per design. Also you can’t be sure if your design is centered and the text function is pretty weak. You can’t control spacing between lines or curve the text and there are also a very limited number of fonts to choose from. The good news though, is that they are aware of these issues and hope to resolve some of them soon.

The center option + more fonts should be up next week, and the text placement does need work.

One really good thing about Wordans though is that it looks like you can print almost anywhere on the shirt. Although I imagine because of the limitations of the designer that you might get some unexpected results. The print area looks large too but I don’t know the actual specs. I find that sometimes it just looks large on the screen.

I think they should totally re-organize their front page and perhaps change their strategy too. The front page does a lot to promote their product designer and not enough to promote shopkeepers designs. Whatever the reason for this is, the fact remains that most shoppers are too lazy/nervous/busy to create their own t-shirts. They want something that has already been designed and made and preferably by professionals. Another thing to note is that people are attracted to images first and text later. When you look at Wordans front page it is mostly text. In fact only ten designs are shown above the flow and I have a 21 inch monitor at 1280×1024. Some people may not even see those 10 designs.

If you are a POD shopkeeper or if you are considering starting out in that business you will want to know if it a good place to start and I have to admit that I don’t think it is and for many reasons. One reason is that is slow to even upload your images. It says it takes up to 24 hours but both times I uploaded images it took much longer than that. The last image took 43 hours to become live. It was just one image. I wonder how long it would take if I had uploaded hundreds of images. They do know this is an issue that needs to be looked at though.

The 24 hour validation is a bit long I agree, especially come time the weekend. We are working for a faster turnaround, but we have to validate and clean up all the designs for them to be suitable for production.

Another point to look at is the fact that we are not given an opportunity to add descriptions (read SEO) which added to the fact that they don’t really promote the designers  and their designs it will be very difficult for people to actually find your shirts. You could release your designs into the Wordans marketplace and hope for the best but they will only give you $2 every time someone uses it. I wouldn’t waste my time with that. And even if you you were happy to get $2 per item sold I don’t think they have really optimized their marketplace for search engines either. They say they are quickly improving their ranking in Google but I wonder for which search results and how well they convert to sales. I imagine that the shopkeepers stores don’t even rank at Google as apart from the title of the shirts they are almost identical.

I would also worry about scalability. I haven’t uploaded enough designs to worry about it at this point but I don’t see any options for categorizing your products or designs or to search within your own store. We can’t expect our customers to browse through pages and pages of designs in the hope that they might just find what they are looking for. Of course they would have to find the pages first.

In my communications with the guys at Wordans they didn’t really want to be compared with Cafepress, said they were less square. I think they were referring to the fact that can print almost anywhere on the t-shirt but if you look at their site as a whole they are totally square.  Their stores can be customized but the core is very strict and very badly arranged. It’s even worse than Zazzle with a lot of space wasted with unnecessary fluff. Take a look at these three Rude Retro stores from Wordans, Zazzle and Cafepress.

http://ruderetro.wordans.com
http://www.zazzle.com/ruderetro
http://www.cafepress.com/ruderetro

You can clearly see that Cafepress offers the most regarding customization and branding of your store. (If you really want to have your own brand store while still using a POD you should definitely check out MyBrand at Printfection.)

I don’t mean to be so negative about Wordans but think of me as an investor who thinks that Wordans would have to improve on many levels for me to risk investing my time and energy. Even though they have very cool features like a designer that you can put right into your website ( see here) and the fact that they will manually try to make all your images t-shirt ready it all comes down to the question of whether I can make more money with Wordans than at my current PODs and the answer is that I don’t think so.

On the other hand I wouldn’t be surpised if great things happened at Wordans very soon and hopefully it will push them up to the level of Cafepres or Zazzle. They talk the talk. Hopefully they will also walk the walk.

We are actually in the process of upgrading our site, and we will bring some great changes that will make this version look primitive.

Review: Robit Studios

A few days ago I received a t-shirt from the good folk at Robit Studios. All their shirts are printed by hand using water-based, environmentally- friendly, inks. They also use sweat-shop free American Apparel shirts. So they literally are good folk. At first when I received the shirt depicting a robot destroying a city with laser beams emanating from what are possibly robot boobs I thought it was a logo shirt and of course was disappointed as I don’t like to advertise on my chest. But this was not the case. It was an error of deduction when I connected the name Robit to the robot. Woops. Anyway, it is not a bad two color print that is possibly warning us of impending doom brought to us by our future over-reliance on machines. Of course I could be reading too much into it and it may simply be an image of a robot destroying a city with boob lasers but the text prepare does make you think.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t really get their shirts. I know they are probably trying to say something with the images but I don’t know what it is. I realize though, that that for me is probably a good thing because, and I have probably never said this about any t-shirt store before, but I would wear any and all of these shirts. I especially like the Explosive Decompression shirt and I guess I might even lose some sleep trying to attach some esoteric meaning to it.

Robit Studios has about ten different t-shirts in stock at the moment and there seems to be a few recurring themes including the military, destruction and impending doom. Currently they are priced from $12 for an Obama T-Shirt to $18 for most of their designs. Shipping is $3 in the US and a very reasonable $5.25 for international shipping. Order more for even better shipping deals.

Runner Up at Springleap

Well, I don’t really really want to start two posts in a row with “Well, some of you may remember..” but some of you may remember a post a few months ago where I announced that I was one of the winners at Springleap’s t-shirt design contest. It took a while (several months) to receive some of my prizes (I haven’t received everything yet) but receive them I did.

Anyway I received a rumpled brown envelope with tons of South African stamps on it addressed to Alan (that’s me) without my surname. Pretty funny, I thought. Looking at the package I didn’t have high expectations about the contents but I was pleasantly surprised. The t-shirts were all professionally folded inside transparent plastic sleeves. Attached to the t-shirts themselves was another clear plastic bag containing a matching button (badge in British English), a card with your design (including Springleap logo) on one side and details about your winning design on the other and a small booklet containing info and images of the other June Winners. Looks very professional

That’s the t-shirts (more detailed review later), but there were supposed to be a few other prizes and there was nothing else in the envelope except a short hand written note from Springleap. The prizes were supposed to be as follows:

• Their own tshirt PLUS 2 others randomly selected from that month’s winning range
• A limited edition poster of their design
• Sponsored prizes (these vary depending on who is sponsoring these prizes and what they wanna give you
• R1 for EVERY TSHIRT of theirs that we sell

I realize that it may take time to find out how many t-shirts are sold before you get paid royalties and I wasn’t too worried about it because to be quite honest the royalties are very low. I calculated it at about 12 cents per shirt sold. Still, that’s about $120 for every thousand t-shirts sold. $120 dollar is nothing to be sniffed at. Anyway I decided to contact them about the royalties, limited edition poster and the sponsored prizes which I have yet to receive. Below are my questions:

1. When do we find out how much our Royalty payments will be and when we receive them?
2. I didn’t receive a skyrove voucher. I don’t know what it is but it was marked as a prize. When do I receive it and what is it?
3. I was told that I would receive a limited edition poster of my design but I didn’t. Is that coming later?

And here is the reply.

1. We will be building a system where you can see how many of your designs have been used on tshirts and other products and how much you have earned and have been paid. It will launch in a few months time. At this time we have only printed 108 of each design, so the royalties are going to be small until the orders start coming in.

2. The skyrove voucher is for use in South Africa on a wireless network - so the vouchers are for South African designers only.

3. We are doing hand drawn designs at this stage of your design which the whole team is signing. We’ll email you your signed design as soon as it is ready.

I was a little surprised that they only printed 108 t-shirts. At 12 cents a t-shirt that works out as a meager $12.96 in royalties for us designers. I know it’s possible that more will be printed but I guess it is not certain. This is very disappointing as I would make more money than that selling two t-shirts on a POD site. Of course I don’t have the chance of winning the $1000 or so grand prize with a POD but still.

Of course I am not all that disappointed about not receiving the skyrove voucher either as I didn’t even know what it was but I think it should have been clearer that this was a prize for only South African designers.

I am a very curious about this hand drawn design thing and looking forward to what they will come up with but I am quite curious about why they are doing a hand drawn design of a design and why they think we would be interested in their team’s signatures (autographs?). Seems bizarre. Also they said they are going to email it to me which means that, unless email technology has advanced tremendously without me hearing about it, that it is not the limited edition poster that I am supposed to receive. Anyway, time will tell.

The T-Shirt Review

I know you are all thinking. What about the t-shirts? How were they? What did you think? Well, I guess I should be embarrassed by this but I didn’t like my own winning t-shirt. The tee is too yellow. Maybe the yellow will improve after a few hundred washes but more than likely it will just sit unworn in my closet. That doesn’t bode well for future sales of this tee either which would also mean that my royalties will be pretty sad. It is possible though that these bright colors are popular in South Africa as another of the tees I received was bright blue and it is not something I could wear either. I am not really into the design either. The third t-shirt was not bad, it was black and I don’t really get the message of the design but that is OK. I think I could wear it.

I don’t know what brand they use but all the t-shirts are the same style and shape and I think the cut is a little strange. The t-shirt seems to be a little tighter under the chest which makes the bottom seem to be a little loose like when the seams lose tension. Also on the back of the t-shirt is the Springleap logo and the designers name. Regular readers will know that I don’t like advertising on my shirt and even though this includes the designer’s names I still think it looks pretty bad. It is big and if the black t-shirt is anything to go by, it may not even match the color of the design. I suspect buyers will also frown at this unnecessary addition.

In general though, and I feel bad saying this as the guys at Springleap seem really nice, I don’t think that it is worth it to submit your design to Springleap. Only the winning t-shirt gets a decent prize and if you have a good design that you think might win you ought to submit it to another t-shirt design contest rather than risk being a runner up.

My advice to Springleap is first to increase the guaranteed prizes for runners up as what exists at the moment is just unfair to the designer. Give the runners up the choice of which t-shirts they want to receive instead of sending out random shirts. This will also give you an idea of which designs that are likely to sell well in the future. Move the back print information inside the t-shirt to the printed label and make it more subtle. Be clearer about what prizes and how much money winners and runners up can expect to receive. Use different blanks. How about Edun Live? They even provide jobs in Africa.

Uneetee Review contd.

Some of you may remember a Uneetee review back in June and that I decided to return one of the tees because it was difficult to make out the design on the actual t-shirt. I thought the return policy was little unfair so I asked Uneetee about it and they kindly allowed me to ship it back without insurance or paying for the shipping back to Japan. To be honest, if I had to pay for those things it wouldn’t have been worth it to exchange the t-shirt. Well, I finally received the replacement t-shirt on September 8th. I know. That is a long time to wait for a t-shirt considering I first made the order on June 1st. A part of the delay is due to me trying to decide what to do. The real problems came later though. I sent the t-shirt to Uneetee and I didn’t hear anything back so after a few weeks I contacted them to see what had happened and they told me that they hadn’t received the t-shirt. I started to see the advantage of getting insurance. Luckily they said they would check again but they couldn’t find the t-shirt I had sent. They said that it was OK though and they promised to send me another t-shirt. I thought that was fair but no tee arrived over here either. So after a few weeks I contacted them again about this issue and I guess they checked again and kindly offered to send another one and an extra mystery tee as an apology. These two tees I did get. Thanks Uneetee.

Now for the review. The replacement t-shirt for Paradise was a little number called King Leo and boy is it a beautiful shirt. My wife was really pleased with it. The design is amazingly detailed and the color of the shirt is perfect. There is not one bad thing about it that I can say. If you want a copy you should get over to Uneetee soon as they appear to be selling out.

The second mystery t-shirt was less impressive. To be honest I didn’t really like it when I first got it but it quickly grew on me and it has become my t-shirt of choice at the moment. I didn’t even get what the design was about at first but after studying it closely I realized it is Icarus falling from the sky. I couldn’t see it over on Uneetee’s site so even if you want one I guess you may be out of luck.

Both t-shirts are American Apparel so I can’t really complain there but to be honest I think that AA are a little long for my taste and as my wife is extra slim she could really wear a smaller size than S but what can you do.

Super Cute Tees from AAITSKI!

The good folks over at Belgian (I think) outfit AAITSKI! sent over a tee to be reviewed. They have a selection of super cute t-shirts that I am sure would be a hit over here in Japan, at least with the girls. The t-shirts are really cute. Oh wait. I think I might have mentioned that. But what I want to say is that because of their cuteness I imagine their main demographic is girls and possibly children.

Anyway they sent over a ladies tee which you can see modeled below by my teelicious wife. Great fit and very cute (again, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I just can’t stop saying cute) design. Pussy Catsy is a four color screen print and we were very impressed with the quality. The print was flawless and the tee is a nice soft material.

The only criticism I have about this shirt and it is a problem I have with many t-shirts is the advertising. The back of the t-shirt shows the url of the store. I know it is a way to get the word out but I think most people don’t want to be walking billboards. For people with long hair though it may not be a problem.

Check out their site for more cu… pretty t-shirts. They are also having a back to school sale at the moment. If you order between August 25th and August 31st you can receive a 10% discount. At least I think that’s correct.

This is totally going in my blog

I received three tees from Zazzle yesterday and I am pretty impressed with the quality. After constantly hearing about the poor quality of POD t-shirts I guess my expectations weren’t all that high. Even if they were high though I wouldn’t have been disappointed. That said I was always pretty impressed with the shirts from Cafepress too. Anyway back to the t-shirts. The t-shirts I received were all from my own store. Sorry fellow Zazzlers and they looked just like they do in my Zazzle gallery. The only criticism is that the print area looks smaller in real life than on the screen. I have included photos so you can compare them yourselves.

The first one here is one of my newest creations and bears the same name as the title of this post. This is totally going in my blog. This is a line from sitcom How I Met Your Mother but I made it because I found myself saying this line (to myself) many times. It is printed on a 6.1oz Hanes Beefy Tee. I have heard many complaints about white printing on dark tees but this is exceptional. It could easily be mistaken for a silkscreen print.

The next one is my Obama 8 T-Shirt from the Rude Politics Store. It is a parody of the Superdry Osaka 8 t-shirt made famous by Beckham. Again the print is very clear and it could also be mistaken for a silkscreen print. Of course it is a simple one color design. It is printed on a 6.1 oz Hanes Tagless tee. A little warm for Japan summer. Definitely night time only.

The final one is one of my favorite designs and one that took me a bit of time. It is a flashback to my childhood when this type of image was very common for toys for young boys. Something as simple as a yo-yo was sold in packages just like this design. It’s on a lightweight American Apparel Tee.

Review: Ningnong T-Shirts

A couple of weeks ago we were sent a top from the nice folk at Ningnong. Notice I said top, and not t-shirt. The piece of clothing that arrived could surely fit the definition of t-shirt but it is really a little too classy to be categorized as such. What I didn’t realize when I first looked at these shirts is that they are basically tourist t-shirts. They are the most stylish tourist t-shirts I have ever seen. Each t-shirt tells a story about different parts of Canada. What a great concept!

There is a small but growing selection of both lady’s tops and men’s t-shirts at the Ningnong website and I know what you are thinking. Where did the name Ningnong come from. Don’t worry, the answer is to be found on their site and it is a pretty clever name when you read it.

<– Click image for closeup.

Now back to the review. We liked the design, the design placement and the light material. It gets pretty hot here. I don’t know which company manufactured the t-shirt but the label says Made in the USA and sweatshop free. The top is longer than a regular t-shirt which which means they can be either tucked in or left out depending on your style. Mrs. Retro was very impressed. It is also low cut which is great for girls who want to flash a bit of cleavage and guys who want to see it. It’s not too raunchy though.

We do have some criticisms though. One is the logo on the back (covered by copious amounts of hair in this picture). We have mentioned before how we don’t like to be walking billboards so we think the logo on the back (outside) is a little too big.  There was one other problem too and while it is not so noticeable when you are wearing it, I think it is important to point out. Because of the placement of the image the print has to cross the seam on the side of the shirt and the ink is pretty smudged along the edge as you can see in the images below. I don’t know if this is a quality control issue or just one of the problems of screen printing over seams. If it is a difficulty issue we think Ningnong should search for a top without side seams.

There is also an interesting t-shirt competition where you can submit your ideas for vouchers, t-shirts and cash prizes, so if you have the next great Canadian T-Shirt idea check it out.

Review: Original Tees from Crooked Monkey

The first time I came across Crooked Monkey T-Shirts was on TV. Those of you who watch the comedy/drama Weeds may have spotted one of their shirts too. Actually after watching the show I quickly did a search and found their store so when they contacted me and wanted their shirts reviewed I was delighted. They have a great selection of funny and witty t-shirts, most of which have a vintage effect which I really like.

One of the t-shirts we received was the very t-shirt that Silas wore on the show and you can see a screen capture below. It’s a great TV show too and I believe a new season has just started.

I am actually wearing this t-shirt at the moment and it got a few laughs when I wore it last night. I know, I should be wearing a clean t-shirt but that’s how I roll, baby. Both of the t-shirts we received were very light and really do look like they are old. The Im Not a Gardener, I Just Like Hos- T-Shirt was made in Mexico and the Dont Waste my Daytime Minutes- T-Shirt was made in China. I you look closely you can see where the original tag was cut off and the Crooked Monkey tag was sewn on.

The t-shirt is a bit crumpled in that picture because it had just come out of the parcel but it is nice and smooth now. Of course it looks better on Silas. The ladies t-shirt is a nice slim fit which is just how my nice slim fit wife likes them. The problem with this shirt though is that when I try to speak to her she just points at the message on her shirt. Be sure to check out the other awesome t-shirts by Crooked Monkey. Then, if you are lucky, you will be watching TV one day with your friends, and you’ll see your t-shirt being worn by a celeb, and you can say “I have that t-shirt. It’s like totally so yesterday like you know”.

Another thing I should mention is the branding. I don’t like to be a billboard but Crooked Monkey brand is not so famous over here (Japan) that people can recognize it so I don’t mind so much. On the back of the t-shirt there is a little Crooked Monkey and it’s kinda cute. Having a monkey on your back isn’t always bad.

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