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The Power of the Printed T-shirt

I could be regarded as an ‘Art Snob’. Indeed, until recently that is exactly how I would describe myself. My background, my training, my studies, have always focused on what was considered ‘high-art’ versus ‘low-art’.

However I find the immediate impact and potential of seeing my art online and even on the street beats the gallery system anyday. I’m going to provide some starter tips for all those considering getting there own t-shirt art out there fast, and perhaps even make a half decent living from it!

Firstly buy a decent domain name! I originally hosted my t-shirts at OneManBrand.com, however I found the rankings irrelevant, I needed to capture a specific market for my specific product range. Now I don’t know about you, but I find domain names packed with domain names a tad trite, gauche, downright awful really. I have my suspicions the public do to.

The greatest ranking t-shirt site on the net is TshirtHell.com. It only seems to contain a hundred or so designs, but its popularity is immense. This is as a professional setup as you can get. They obviously print and distribute everything inhouse. For now that isn’t possible for me, I’d need new premises, a screen printing table and tools, etc. I had a scout around to see who could deal with that side of my new business, I was expecting to find a printers or a business partner who would come on board. However over the recent years, beginning with hwww.cafepress.com, and now joined by other services such as www.spreadshirt.com and www.zazzle.com. All are major companies offering very professional store setups.

I decided to go with the most established t-shirt marketplace service, Cafe Press. You may ask why, seeing as they charge for their premium accounts, something you won’t need to do with many of the others. However apart from one bad experience where Spread Shirt practically ordered me to use ‘thicker lines’ in my designs (yuck!), there is only one reason why I went with Cafe Press, and that’s the scripts available

to modify your cp store. I chose www.notonebit.com’s CafeScript, a php script that can really rework your store templates and even include item description pages at your own separate domain. Best of all you can include meta information for every page and every item your site displays.

I have heard of another script called cpshop, you can read more about it at http://www.marty.net – it’s a cgi script which is why I avoided it, however those who prefer cgi to php should check it out. It seems to have a little less capability but as the price is lower I’m sure some will find it useful.

So now, with CafeSCripts apart from the actual checkout page, I can direct all my marketing to my own domain site RetroGod.com. The main advantage of this is to gain better links and ranking from the engines. Sending all your traffic to a subdomain of someone else’s website is never a good idea, you’ll practically receive no credit from the search engines for all that hard work. More so it looks more professional! It’s a great tool for advertising too, consider adding your new domain link to all your forum and blog signatures, even your articles, check the bottom of mine for an example.

Viral marketing is always the best way to go I’d say, the more real people who reccommend your site, the more likely you’ll build a faithful following. Once you have visitors, consider adding a mailing list so you can keep those who took the time to visit you, totally updated, and do update! I on average add at least 3 designs a week, it doesn’t sound much, but with the work involved in creating them, I’d say it was plenty. I’ve seen t-shirt sites with thousands of original designs, and all of them are awful. If you want to make an impact on your market, you have to stand out in the crowd. Hearts, flags and dogs are the most popular t-shirts for both buyers and sellers. You can imagine the competition, and the boredom of creating a – I (heart) city – t-shirt collection. Every city in the USA, or even the world, everyone the same design with a different location, doesn’t sound inspiring work to me. If you can make a living that way and you enjoy it, great. I couldn’t ever find inspiration in such a factory-like process of design production.

I want my t-shirts to cause a stir. I want to make t-shirts that I would wear, my friends would wear, and just about anyone I thought was ‘cool’ should wear, and I do. I have focused on retro style t-shirts. My influences include 1950′s and 1960′s advertising, vintage urban and disco wear, 1980′s tacky graphic design, old toys, cars, knitting patterns, war propaganda. The list is endless. What results from this is always the same ideal. Firstly creating an outstanding graphic artwork, secondly subvert the message. Creating a viral t-shirt takes a lot of brainstorming. Similar, I guess, to the way a comedian will hone a joke. You need to turn the concept on its head. I love to use 1950′s style images for women, because they are simple to subvert. Take the nostalgia of half a century ago and combine it with today’s motivated and highly political culture, and you result in something shocking, and hopefully hilarious. I maybe wrong on this but a biology tutor once told me that a ‘laugh’ is a nervous reaction, the diagphragm in your stomach wobbles when you’re logic centre stalls, i.e if a simple premise becomes baffling you laugh until you crystalize the underlying concept.

I try to do that with my work, proverbially pull the rug from under the feet of my customers. Pull them in with a nostalgic image, a funky retro look, a cool fifties jazz style, or some urban grunge graphics, and then add a slogan to throw them off course. Some of the titles of my tees include, ‘Plonker, Cannibal, Ninjas!, Wedding Vows, Mother’s Little Helpers, and Player’. You can probably guess the basic idea from the titles. For instance Cannibal’s slogan reads ‘Sure… it’s Cannibalism, but MEAT is MEAT!’. Shocking, funny, but most of all unexpected. The trick is to consider both meat lovers, bbq fans and such, plus the veggies of the world. The joke works both ways, you’re meat mad, or mad to eat meat!

Okay, I’m using another great piece of software to promote my t-shirt site, and it’s called Instant Cafe Feeder. This is a great piece of freeware, yep free. It’s basically a tool to aggregate all your cafepress items and create a .csv file compatible with www.froogle.com. For those who don’t know, this is Google’s new shopping search engine, and the industry has big expectations for it. The feeder freeware will help you submit all your CP t-shirts fast, something that would normally take hours, takes minutes. An alternative to this software is Cafe Toolbox. This is a similar program, hosted online, so it’s useful for those on the move to update their Froogle listings anywhere.

I’m in the process of adding my site to as many free directories as possible, however, I won’t be trading reciprocal links as Google has begun to penalise this! If they want one I’m off, 3-way linking I’m not so keen on, but for the most relevant sites I’ll do it, but in general I keep links one-way wherever possible.

Make sure you’ve made a Google Sitemap of your site and submit that to Google too! It always seems to speed things up in regards to ranking. Although it’s worth submitting to the major engines, I feel that t-shirt related directories should be your first choice. Some I’ve found are -

www.iratethis.com

www.t-shirtseller – which also has a t-shirt webring!

www.t-shirtlinks.com

Whatever you do, aim for a specialist target audience. Like sports? Try sports humour, better still extreme sports humour! Don’t aim for the top of the mountain or you’ll trip over the pebble by your foot.

About the Author

Paul Baines is a graduate trained designer, an electronic musician, and general show off. He sells unique retro t-shirts atRetrogod.com

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