A few weeks ago we had the honor of guest blogging at Pop Culture Tees, a t-shirt blog that we frequently visit. The first thing about the blog that got my attention was the sick design with some cool contrasting colors. Liz took the blog design to another level to say the least. The thing that got me hooked was the strong content. Liz definitely has a right brain to match the left. Her design and copywriting skills are equally advanced.

Our article was about taking good artwork and making it great for t-shirt printing. Just some simple tips on cleaning up artwork to ensure the best possible t-shirt print. Here are a few screenshots of the post and you can read it here:

Thanks to Pop Culture Tees for the opportunity and we encourage you to start following their work if you don’t already.

We want to give a quick shout out to a really talented designer with a lot of great t-shirt prints.  Sven Palmowski, aka a.mar.illo, has a new shirt over at Design By Humans called ‘The Prophecy’:

As you can see this terrific oversized print features a futuristic city scene with details that seem both sharp and somehow blurred and muddled at the same time (which often makes for more ‘realistic’ future scenes since no one’s actually seen them ).

A.mar.illo has quite a few other awesome designs as well.  Check out his site at http://www.palmowski.eu/.

I love this one because the glasses are SO prominent.  He definitely took artistic rights by calling the thing wearing the glasses a boy.  The font used is cool because it looks homemade.

We’re looking forward to seeing more great work from a.mar.illo in the future!  Be sure to check out his site and let us know your favorites.

Over the past few weeks we’ve created a series of blog posts to assist people in creating their own t-shirt line.  The past blogs have acted as an introduction to the process, help with design, and knowing your audience.  Today we would like to focus on a topic which goes hand in hand with knowing your audience, knowing your competitors.  This is something which we’ve touched on lightly in our past blogs and today we would like to nail down a few more of the specifics.  We hope that you’ll find this helpful and we encourage you to check out the other blogs in the series as well.

Knowing who your competitors are is essential.  It lets you know what you’re up against.  If your customers repeatedly mention ‘XYZ T-Shirts’ or compare your products to ‘XYZ T-Shirts’ then you can bet that getting to know a little bit about ‘XYZ T-Shirts’ is a good idea!  If possible, find out:

-how long they’ve been around
-how large are they in terms of sales, capital, and profit
-how large they are in terms of employee size
-where they are based
-how much they spend in advertising sales
-how many products they offer

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of the possible information you’ll want to find out about them, but it’s a good start and it’s general enough to be helpful in most cases.  Basically the function of all of these different questions is the same; they questions will help you learn about your competitors and it will put everything into perspective for you.

For example, you might be bummed out after your first year to find out that you only made a fraction of the sales that ‘XYZ T-Shirts’ made.  On the other hand, if you know that XYZ has been in business for many years, that they have a huge staff size, that they spend tons in advertising and other overhead, then you might not feel so bad about your own first year.

Knowledge about your competitors will also help you know what you need to do to set yourself apart. Remember, you want to continue to successfully appeal to your target audience like they are (presumably) doing, but you also want to find a way to brand yourself and find a competitive edge.  Without knowing about the competition in the first place, that becomes impossible.

Finally, knowing about your competitors will help you figure out what you need to do to successfully market your line to your buyers.  If you’re producing similar items and selling them to similar kinds of people then it stands to reason that you will want to employ a lot of similar strategies for advertizing and marketing.

Remember doing your homework and learning about the competition and the market will be invaluable to you in the long run!

In keeping with our past installments of the top blogs of the week, today we bring you another edition with a twist. In fact the twist is that they feature ‘twisted’ tees. Check them out!

‘T-Shirt For The Broken Heart’ from The Daily Tee
This t-shirt features a bloody and damaged looking, realistic style heart. The band-aids make it clear that this is a ‘broken heart’. This is definitely a shirt you’ll want to check out if you want to make someone feel guilty…or slightly disturbed.

‘Clash of the Titans T-Shirt by Pyscho Reindeer’ from Tcritic
When part of the blog title features the word ‘psycho’ it’s a pretty safe bet that the blog will make the freaky list. In this case the featured shirt depicts a certain creepy robot owl and links to a very cool, very freaky t-shirt company.

‘A Code of Honour Amongst The House of Thieves’ from Buy-Tees
Creepy, ghoulish arms, a half-dead looking girl, and plenty of skulls for good measure. Another blog that was a definite in from the get go. This one does a fantastic job proving information and a review of The House of Thieves company.

‘Inidivisual Have a New Tee and a Lovely Coupon Code’ from Hide Your Arms
A bit less creepy than most of this week’s picks, this one makes it in the merit of the freaky looking nature man with the red eyes and the flowers growing out of his mouth. An added bonus is that this shirt is eco-friendly!

‘A Vintage Pink Floyd Shirt That’s All Wright’ from Defunkd
Check out the pigs and the psychedelic Pink Floyd symbol and it’s easy to see what this blog is doing here as well. Not to mention the fact that Pink Floyd is iconic and the designs are just plain cool to begin with.

‘In Black We Trust’ from Addic[tee]d
Check out the creepy skeleton man with the long rocker hair and the crazy looking, semi-face design on the last tee. There’s no way you’ll fail to make an impression wearing those. We can even forgive the too-fast flashing animation this blog employes.

‘Ambiguous Shady Tee at The Urban Shop’ from The Fat Seagull
The Fat Seagull made an excellent selection with this blog. The design is a terrific all over print with a pair of textured sunglasses. Everyone knows sunglasses are a common tactic for disguising evil and thus this very cool blog makes the cut too.

‘Tomorrow Will Be Fine’ from Funky Duds
Maybe it’s just me, but that face - although definitely cute - looks a little freaky to me. Check
out those eyes and that smile. Don’t they seem to be hiding malicious intent? In any case tomorrow will be fine with this nifty shirt.

‘12 new tees over at No Star Clothing’ from Hide Your Arms
These shirts are pretty cool. Most of them are definitely on the funny side, but the campfire heart
and broken toothed lips are definitely enough to tilt into the twisted category. The very amusing ‘hoo’ and ‘Maybe Partying Will Help’ are high quality bonuses!

‘Barcodewood’ from ShirtFind
There’s certainly a healthy dose of symbolism and plenty of room for interpretation with this shirt. Are we destroying nature for consumerism? Will it ultimately overshadow everything else? Who cares (forgive the stolen owl shirt pun) when it features an adorably cute but twisted looking creature encountering a creepy barcode forest?

‘Beautiful Decay T-Shirts and Hoodies On Sale’ from Tcritic
The company Beautiful Decay is practically synonmous with creepy, but well-designed clothes. Just take a look at the first shirt featured in this blog and you know right away that these shirts are no exception. A skinny, pale sleeping girl who seems to be engulfed in a combination of her own hair and a dark, shadowy essence…well I’m freaked out!

‘When Animals go Wild’ from The T-Shirt Review
This blog is definitely the epitome of our creepy collection (way to go The T-Shirt Review!). We have an incredibly morbid statement written in blood red ink, a bloody ninja monkey, rabbits holding everything from bloody axes, deadly carrots, and chainsaws, a cat running away with a bleeding dismembered tongue, and finally what is, in my opinion, the ultimate in gore a blood-soaked Hobbes crouching over a mutilated Calvin….WOW!

‘New T-Shirts from No Star Clothing From WTF to McCain’ from Cottonable
I know we already mentioned a blog that listed these tees, but Cottonable has some great write-ups to go with the fewer shirts they featured and the designs are larger and more visible. Our favorite is the WTF pill dispenser. Yeah that about sums up what we were thinking after seeing this week’s featured blogs.

This is the third post in a series of blogs to give people tips and advice for starting their own t-shirt lines. This idea was conceived from the numerous phone calls and daily inquires people make regarding this topic and it’s our hope that the readers will find this series helpful and informative. Be sure to check out the other two posts [links?] and stay tuned for more!

Today we want to discuss the importance of doing your homework when it comes to knowing your audience. What we mean is, it’s very important to ask yourself “who am I trying to sell my t-shirts to?”. This will influence all aspects of your business! For example you come up with completely different designs if you’re marketing to baby boomers as opposed to Gen X-ers. You’ll also have vastly different designs if you’re focusing on say the tech/sci-fi crowd versus the music crowd. These are just two VERY basic examples and there’s a huge ‘niche’ potential. Of course you may want to focus on ‘mass appeal’, but even there it’s STILL important to know exactly which ‘masses’ you want to appeal to.

Once you have your target audience in mind, you’ll want to consider various aspects about them. For example, what is their culture like? What types of references and common history do they share? This too will heavily impact the designs you come up with. You’ll also want to bear in mind what they are likely to spend their money on in the first place. It’s a good idea to get a feel for where they often like to shop. Online and/or offline? Who are your competitors? What types of products do the stores that are popular with this group carry? What are prices and purchase volumes like?

Another useful thing to find out is what sites and other areas of the internet do they inhabit? This will be important to discover not only so that you can gain more information on their interests and ‘personalities’, but also so that you can consider marketing to them. Would you want to buy ad space on one of the popular sites for this group of people? Would you be able to tailor it to appeal to them?

Remember, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If something has been working well with your demographic and you’re able to establish yourself as a strong, viable option to them then there’s no reason to think similar strategies won’t prove useful to you as well!

One of the hottest trends right now in the t-shirt design world is to design VERY detailed, intricate prints.  These amazing t-shirts are like a work of art and they turn the wearer into a sort of walking canvas, showcasing the designer’s masterpiece and impressing friends along the way!

One trend is the use of patterns, colors, and designs that would also look very much in place on tattoos.  Check out this incredible design called ‘Platinum Flocked’.  It’s done on a very cool double shirt:

As you can se the under-sleeve is very reminiscent of the kinds of tats people often get on their arms.  The main shirt images and designs are also in the style of a large, fancy tattoo.  All around it’s extremely well-done and very beautiful!

Another great use of really intricately designed t-shirts is in the creation of very sharp, beautiful images in creative, abstract renderings.  Check out this awesome design called ‘Bonafide Lovin’ ‘:

As you can see it’s very reminiscent of the 60s peace movement and imbues the wearer with a sort of air of spiritual enlightenment.

This next one called ‘Live Lyrics from the bank of Imaginary’ evokes the music movement to get its message across.  Don’t be fooled though, this is still a very serious, artistic shirt.  Check out the life-like face and design of the man and the amazing details and colors scattered throughout the shirt:

Finally, we wanted to showcase a design called ‘Radical Beauty’.  Check it out:

As you can see, the design features a beautiful women in a radical explosion of color and imagery.  Despite the chaotic nature of the print it’s also extremely sharp and clear.

These terrific shirts really highlight this popular and excellent trend.  Cool!