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.

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.

Great Upgrades from Cafepress

This is another good day for POD shopkeepers. Cafepress have launched a few upgrades, one of which I mentioned before but quickly disappeared. That was the design tab of the sale report. It is even better than I had first thought. Not only does it tell you which designs are selling well, it shows their tags. You can see an example below. The design is first, then the number you have sold (in this case: 1), the image number, the store and finally the tags. (I had to chop it a little to fit on the page.)

The image basket has also been upgraded making it easy to find CUP images. For those who don’t know CUP stands for Content Usage Policy and the CUP guys make decisions based on possible copyright and trademark infringements. There are a few other enhancements including bulk image deleting. Just check it out for yourself.

There is also a new Share it / Post it feature on items in the marketplace. I think the email it feature had already been there but this is a sign that Cafepress is willing to embrace its Web 2.0 brethren. What was it waiting for?  I would highlight it more though. If we hadn’t been told about it I don’t know how long it might have taken for me to notice it by myself. Also it appears only to be in the marketplace. I can already hear cries about Cafepress trying to marginalize our stores. I don’t know about that but please Cafepress, add this function to our stores as well.

Finally, back to Infinistitch, Cafepress’ pseudo-embroidery. More colors have been added to their lineup. The mens polo shirts are now available in red and navy as well as black. Women’s now have navy and black. The men’s performance jacket is now available in navy as well black. The military cap can be purchased in black and mocha as well as the already existing olive. Deck Blue and Ivy have been added to the stonewashed caps.

All in all it is a good day for Cafepress shopkeepers.

More details.

Transformers T-Shirts Banned from Airplanes?

Our friends over at Zazzlr brought brought this incident to our attention. It seems that 30 year old, Brad Jayakody, an IT professional was told to change out of his “gun-arm” toting Transformers T-Shirt or he wouldn’t be allowed board the plane. (See original article) Furthermore if he changed back into it he was told he would be arrested. How ridiculous! As he wondered himself, did they think he was going to going to try pass off the image of Optimus Prime’s gun arm on his t-shirt as a real gun? You would think that the security staff have better things to spend their time on.

Anyway, below are a couple of very cool Transformer’s T-Shirts but if you purchase them be sure not to wear them when flying.

Zazzle win USPS Award

For those of you who don’t know that POD company Zazzle is more than a t-shirt vendor (much more by the way) you will be surprised to hear that they received an award from the United States Service for…well, it was put so succinctly on the Zazzle blog that I will just post the important excerpt here:

Zazzle was recognized by the U.S. Postal Service with the Strategic Business Development Award for our commitment to a successful business partnership with the Postal Service! This “best in class” award recognized us for taking steps to implement new technologies and best practices to maximize efficiencies in the mail value chain that provide customers with a mail product that delivers increased value and business results.

If you are looking for some unique postage for a special occasion/person you can check out the huge collection or even make your own at Zazzle.com.

These custom stamps are a great way for artists to make a bit of extra cash. Especially if you get into the right niche. If you design for weddings for example you are likely to sell your postage stamps in bulk.

Obama Monkey T-Shirt

There have been protests over the sale of T-Shirts depicting Barack Obama as a monkey. It is of course a race issue. While the maker of the t-shirt claims they were not meant to be offensive and I kind of believe him (as the shirts were pro-Obama), some people were offended. I think that the protesters feel that this t-shirt, by depicting Obama as a monkey, is depicting all black people as monkeys, or something to that effect. That is BS though. It was just depicting Obama as a monkey. When Bush was depicted as a monkey I don’t remember demonstrations on the street.

I think the real issue here is that the monkey bears a striking resemblance to Curious George and so does the publishing company that owns the Curious George brand. I think the bar owner may be regretting his decision to sell t-shirts now. On the other hand, they say there is no such thing as bad publicity.

POD becomes EOD at Cafepress?

It seems that CafePress has sent embroidered caps to a few shopkeepers so this may be a sign that Cafepress will not only offer POD (Print on Demand) services but also EOD (Embroider on Demand) services. If they have sent out these caps to shopkeeper’s I think it is only fair to assume that they might be publicly released soon. I also don’t see why they would stop at caps. I think it is only a matter of time before these services are provided for t-shirts too.

Above you can see one of the caps being modeled by one Cafepress shopkeepers lovely daughter, who kindly gave me permission to post them here. I love the new hat but I think that, as usual, the print area, or embroider area in this case, is too small. We need more control over the look of the hat. It is still a very exciting development from Cafepress and I will post more about this when I know.

Zazzle and Cafepress in the News

I have been a POD shopkeeper for a couple of years but I have just recently noticed that these shops and the shopkeepers are making the news more and more. Today I came across an article on CNBC which mentioned both shops again with regard to political t-shirts. It said that Cafepress, which is probably the largest POD company, say that recently 20% of sales are political merchandise. That is a lot of political merchandise. Cafepress also has a meter showing the per-candidate sales and puts Barrack Obama at about 60%. A quick piece of math will tell you that 12% of Cafepress’ sales are generated by Barrack Obama. Wow.

For a quick look at the best of Zazzle Barrack Obama T-Shirts check out my previous post.

On the CNBC web page there is also a video where many t-shirt vendors shirts can be seen but it definitely focuses on Zazzle and Cafepress. I also noticed a brief image of one of Rude Retro’s Client 9 t-shirts at the beginning of the video and as it doesn’t have an embedding feature I took a screen capture.

This is the second time that I am aware of that Rude Retro’s t-shirts have been in the news. The first time was also regarding Eliot Spitzer.