Rude Retro’s 1200KM Challenge

Whoever follows @RudeRetro on Twitter must know already that I have been running since the summer and you may also know that today I created a challenge on the Nike+ website. That challenge is to run 1200km in one year which 100km a month and just less than 25km a week.

I am not a fast runner. Nor do I have a lot of stamina but I hope to change the stamina situation. To be honest, I was never much of an athlete. It’s not that I didn’t like sports but I was a bit lazy in my school days and a lot lazy after I left. For years I used to tell the joke: I went for a run once, I didn’t like it. The fact it though, it wasn’t a joke. In my college days I got up early one morning and without stretching or preparing in any way I headed out for a jog. It was refreshing. Later that morning I went to class and half way through the day my body started to ache. The next day was much worse and I didn’t go for a run for about 15 years. That was last year.

I lived in Australia for two years and worked mostly in construction so I was able to turn my skinny frame into something more muscular. I had never been so healthy in my life despite having a hectic nightlife. And I am talking hectic. One time after work on a Friday (I got up at 6am) I headed off to a weekend rave with my friends and didn’t sleep until Sunday afternoon. Anyway, I diverge.

After Australia I moved to Japan where I now reside and didn’t exercise much after the first year and even then it was just a few sit-ups, push-ups and dumbbells while watching TV.  Well, gradually I started putting on weight and gradually can be a lot of weight over 8 years. When I left Ireland I was about 62kg and now am closer to 75. Still I am not terribly fat. I had a checkup recently in Japan and the doctor didn’t mention my weight and they are quite strict here. That said I have soft stomach and a double chin, both of which I want to change and that is why I am running. I loved when I was fit and healthy and I want to return to that form. I also want to look good for my wife. She looks amazing even after having a baby.

I use the Nike+ system as it is a great motivator. I have always been interested in improving my ability and checking my progress and the Nike+ system makes it very easy. I had already been considering it when I read this article in Wired and that just decided it for me. Check it out: The Nike Experiment.

I started running last year but I ran only on the running machine in the gym and then as some of you might remember I took part in the 10km race of the Yokohama City Marathon.　Going to the gym was a bit of a pain in the ass. I cycled there and then spent a few minutes changing and then cycled home. I liked the fact that I could measure the distance on the running machines though and as I mentioned that itself is a motivator for me.  It just consumed a lot of my day. Running is different though. I start running outside my house and turn around when I get half way so when I am finished I am home. Nike+ records my time, speed and distance on my wife’s pink iPod Nano. Then I transfer it to the Nike+ website via iTunes. It’s a great way to keep track of your runs. You can check my Nike+ profile here: http://my.nike.com/Rude-Retro

This is surely my most personal post on the T-Shirt Review and I didn’t even mention a t-shirt but anyway if anybody wants to join my challenge or friend me on Nike+ that’d be great.

I’m Not Pussyfooting T-Shirt

It has been a very long time since I promoted one of my own t-shirts so give me a break. Actually I haven’t had time to design many tees recently and to be honest, when Cafepress reduced our commissions to 10% I lost a lot of motivation. Of course this is at Zazzle who are great. I hope to start designing for them again soon but don’t worry I won’t post all of my new designs here.

Earth Day T-Shirt – Small feet are sexy

Carbonfund.org have teamed up with Cafepress to produce and sell this pretty sweet tee designed to promote environmental awareness. Here is the blurb from the tee page:

Celebrate Earth Day with a carbon-neutral AnvilRecycled shirt. Proceeds benefit Carbonfund.org, which certified the shirt CarbonFree. View Carbonfund.org’s other products at Cafepress.com/carbonfund

Certified CarbonFree^® by Carbonfund.org’s Product Certification Program, the high-quality, pre-shrunk AnvilRecycled^® T-shirt features 69 percent pre-consumer recycled cotton. This tee has been released just in time for Earth Day so you to can help spread awareness. Below are a couple of Rude Retro’s environmental awareness t-shirts which you can purchase in a variety of styles at Zazzle.

Unscheduled Hiatus

Well, I took a break. Don’t worry. It wasn’t because I was bored of talking about t-shirts. My wife just had our first child and things have gotten pretty hectic.  As you can imagine, I may not be posting as frequently as I did before but once my wife and child are both home from the hospital I may have a teeny bit more time and I will try to keep you posted on what’s happening in the world of t-shirts. I have been keeping an eye out. Here is some of what I have been observing without having time to write about. I hopefully will be able to write in more detail later though.

Artist and designer, Jimiyo, has taken a job with Design by Humans. I hope he continues to submit designs to the various contests in his spare time. His design was recently sold on a shirt.woot tee and I just recently received my very own Jimiyo t-shirt from Uneetee.  More about that later.

Speaking of Design by Humans, they are holding a Quicksilver design contest and the second of the DBH music series. This time it is the more hip than Fleetwood Mac, Kings of Leon. I hope the designs are better than what I have seen of Fleetwood Mac.

Spreadshirt scored €10 million investment capital and have added some cool and cute stuff to their site. I imagine we will see more and more dramatic changes over there now that they have some spare cash. I will probably talk about it at my relatively new site: POD Helper rather than on the T-Shirt Review. More about POD Helper later.

Oh, and T-Shirt Hell didn’t close down after all. It was a prank. Owner, Sunshine Megatron, says it was a strategy to generate income. Read more at T-Shirt Hell be warned, it is not for the faint hearted.

Yet another contest site will be opening up soon called Teextile. Sorry guys. I didn’t have time to check you out. I will keep an eye on you though. I came across another new t-shirt contest site, a Christian one, but I may have lost the link.

They guys at Zero Boutique sent me a couple of tees to review which I received this morning so that is something to look forward to.

I also came across a picture of the love of my life, my darling wife on a t-shirt blog. It was a bit of a surprise. She is wearing Uneetee’s King Leo. Shirts on Sale if you are curious about the mother of my baby. (Edit: The pic was changed and no longer features my wife.)

Well, there was more and I will tell you about it in more detail later.

PS. For people who have emailed me and haven’t gotten a reply I’ll try to get back to you very soon.

The T-Shirt Review Update

I started this blog a little over a year ago and although I didn’t really start blogging regularly until March, there have already been 358 posts which I am pretty happy about. Google awarded my efforts by promoting me to Page Rank 4 a few days ago and I just found out that I have exactly 100 subscribers to my feed. (If you haven’t already subscribed, now is  good time to make sure you don’t miss out.)

If I keep up this pace I should have no problem doubling the number of posts by the end of the year and hopefully I can double the number of subscribers too. In celebration, I have opened a new area in the forum where you are free to post and promote t-shirts and t-shirt stores. You can post pics and links. Enjoy.

Forum: Check out my Tees

Upgrades

I know. It has been a few days since my last post. I’m pretty busy at the moment but I hope to have a few new posts soon. I am also currently working on a POD review which is taking longer than I had expected but it will be comprehensive. Stay tuned.

This is just to let you know that as of today I have upgraded my forum to the latest version of Wordpress (very sleek) and also updated the theme. Most of the changes are behind the scenes so you shouldn’t notice any real differences except for the fact that we now have threaded comments. That’s right. You can comment on other peoples comments. Pretty cool right. There might be a few bugs though so if you notice anything that doesn’t seem right please let me know. Thanks.

Important Notice

This blog was down for quite a while and we apologize for the inconvenience. We decided to move this site to another host because of issues with bandwidth. We didn’t have enough. I think this host will be able to handle it nicely. There may have been some problems with the move so if you come across anything odd please let me know either in a comment or through the contact form. Thanks. Any comments, forum posts or emails sent to this domain since my previous post may have been lost in the move.

Thanks again for visiting The T-Shirt Review and please feel free to join in the t-shirt discussion either in the comment area or in the forum.

The T-Shirt Review News

I just thought I would let you all know that I have changed the RSS feed over to feedburner and that you can also now subscribe by email if you want to be sure not to miss any posts. Just check the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.

Other news is that in the latest Google shakeup The T-Shirt Review moved from Google Page Rank 2 to PR3.

After my lengthy post and review about Springleap not only was I contacted by Springleap but also by Skyrove who kindly offered to send me the Skyrove voucher that Springleap didn’t give me. I checked their map though and there is no Japanese coverage yet. Springleap also said there are some changes coming. You can see more in the comments for that post.

Also our forum is open and ready for posts so feel free to start a discussion and if you have any ideas about what you would like to see in the forum or in this blog for that matter just let me know.

Thanks for reading.

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.

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.

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