BestLosers 3rd year
BestLosers' "birthday" was way back in September but I didn't have much to say about plans for BestLosers' 3rd year at that point. Now that a new calendar year has started, I finally have a few things to mention.
As far as how the plans for year 2 worked out, here's a scorecard:
- Getting the site more organized: B+. I could probably do more but I rescued some of the more general posts and put them as featured links above the regular monthly archives.
- Creating my own SpreadShirt shop: Soon!. I'll be opening up my shop in the next few weeks. It's not exactly BestLosers-related except that I'll be keeping you informed about how successful it is and how you can do it yourselves.
- Rebuilding the t-shirt gallery: C. The t-shirt gallery was replaced with the blog-style Buy and Vote galleries which is useful but not nearly as ambitious as I was planning. It's very likely I won't try to work this further.
- Interview with Joel Lewis: Never happened. I don't expect it will at this point.
Plans for year 3:
- The aforementioned SpreadShirt shop.
- A series of articles on what to do with your failed derby designs. There's a lot more options on the t-shirt landscape than there were when BestLosers started. I'll be going through them all.
- More interviews! Interviews with artists on technique, interviews with shops on how they choose which designs they print, and more.
- ?. We have comments now -- I'd like to hear what YOU'D like to see more of around here.
Comments
MJ
Have you considered using http://www.redbubble.com/ instead of Spreadshirt? I've been trying them out recently and think their quality is high, and that site has the advantage of having an active population of customers and artists (something I believe most of the competition lacks).
xazothia
I am really interested in articles about other shirt sites! Interviews about how various sites select their shirts would also really interest me. I hope you can get a lot of 'em. :)
ThatRobert
MJ, I've had RedBubble on my links page for a long time but never looked too deeply since they're based in Australia and the costs looked a little high. Have you bought and/or sold shirts from there?
As far as shirt quality, Skreened also uses American Apparel exclusively and AA shirts are an option even at CafePress and SpreadShirt.
MJ
I bought a shirt from them as a Christmas gift and was very impressed with the quality (the level of detail was great, especially for a black shirt). I put a few designs up a couple of weeks ago and already sold one (without any marketing on my part, I've yet to link it anywhere) so I think they're potentially a great market for former Woot designs.
It's definitely a bit pricey, but even so I think they're better and more reliable than the other options. I'd still say Spreadshirt is the best option if you're plot printing, but for DTG I think RedBubble would be more successful in the long run- they have way more community, as far as I can tell.
ThatRobert
It sounds like redbubble is a good option if you're looking to get your shirts out there easily. I'll look into it further for that. Where the big guys really excel is letting you build your own distinct commercial shop ala Amorphia Apparel. That's what I'm trying to do right now.
