April showers bring logo flowers! A new heart is brought into bloom, and we realized that there were quite a few things that needed some dusting off.

It all started in our headquarters. We collected quite a bit of stuff over the years here and the white walls really needed a bit of color. So, we’ve cleaned out some junk, moved furniture around and splashed a bit of color on the walls. You can see what a difference it makes – our headquarters have been cleaned up and the walls are as colorful as our t-shirts. But I don’t want to waste your time reading about painting and redecorating. There are more important things we’ve been working on. The newly designed logo has given a new and modern shape to the heart, and the slightly different green is as fresh as the spring and our new products. While remaining true to our heart, we have reanimated typeface to breathe new life into our logo.

And whilst we were at it, we reviewed our whole corporate design. Particularly Doreen – one of our great graphic designers – set her hand to the task. Her creative and artistic touch will adorn many of our illustrations and graphic designs in future. But what’s behind all these changes? After ten years of Spreadshirt and five years with our Lovetab logo, the time was just ripe for a fresh breeze. We do not only want to keep our ears on the tracks of time, but also have an eye on quality and creativity. Our new products reflect this idea. And the new logo is only the first of many things that will change at Spreadshirt in the months to come. These changes will also affect remodelling of our homepage as well as the user area for our partners and designers.

Now, what’s a prototype zombie? Wonky walk, restricted ability to communicate and an infatigable appetite for human flesh. I do have a weak spot for zombies – on my screen. To see zombies taking over in reality would be something less desirable, so being prepared can never be wrong! Here are the top 5 survival rules deduced from Zombieland, 28 Days Later, Cockneys vs Zombies as well as the TV series The Walking Dead:

#1 Team up with other survivors In case of a zombie apocalypse, human company is ever so helpful.

#2 Don’t forget to pack fresh underpants and socks. You never know when you return…

#3 Travel with pensioners. Senior citizens make for spritely and vigorous fighters (and are slower than you).

#4 Rub curry sauce all over you. You will look a monstrocity and the pungent smell will cover up your human aroma. But be careful: Not only zombies, but also fellow soldiers can take you for someone undead.

#5 No crisps – that’s a no-no! Rustling sounds attract zombies.

So be sure to wear adequate zombie gear to be prepared if it comes to the worst. Find more zombie t-shirts in our T-Shirt Shop!

Oh boy, time does fly. It’s been 2 months since we last introduced a new product to you. Time to catch up, here we go!

Let’s start with the new flexible iPhone cover.
 
DThe rubber casing is available for both the iPhone 4/4S and iPhone 5. Gaps have been left for all ports and the camera lens so that the case provides complete user convenience. The buttons on the side are protected by rubber, but can of course still be pressed. The case is available in white/black or in white/white, and it can be personalised to give it a completely individual face.
 
And we want to keep it handy!
 
We have added the organic tote bag to our line again. The bag is from the ‘Earthpositive Line’ by Continental Clothing and has been produced by using renewable resources alone. So there’s a whole lot of sun and wind and love in this nice piece of cotton. So if you like it colourful, then there are – next to black and white – magenta, plum, bright green or red, then use this handy companion to bag all the things you need on a lovely spring day on the go.

Get ready for festivals, holidays, bike tours and rambling outing. And to have even smaller things handy when you need them, we have added a beltbag to our range for you. The colour selection is remarkable as it is available in black, navy, red, royal blue, graphite and orange. Small but important things can be safely stashed away in 2 pouches, and the bag can be adjusted in size.

And now that spring has eventually arrived on our shores, we have also added something for the kids.
 
Little girls can look forward to wearing our new Racerback Top for children. Flowers, butterflies, princesses, strawberries and bees can be printed on this summery top, which is available in white, black, fuchsia, navy and yellow. Available sizes include a range from 98/104 – 146/152.
 
Little lads and big boys will enjoy the addition of the Baseball Top by B&C to our product range. Boys adore their dads, and now they can dress like them when taking to the pitch with their father. We now offer the little guys a selection of colours in white/navy and white/red. Available sizes range from 98/104 – 146/152.
 
And then we have something new for active people.
 
Have you noticed a rising number of joggers and cyclists recently? Absolutely! So we thought it was about time to stock up with sports gear. Sporty men should check out the new and versatile Football Jersey by SOL. And of course this t-shirt is not only suited for playing football. You can wear it e.g. to go jogging, to play badminton or to take the bike for a spin. And no…, that’s not been it, because there are matching shorts to go with the jersey. Available sizes range from S-XXL, and of course there is a a broad array of colours. These include white, black, yellow, orange, red, blue and green. So away with the woolies, slip into some lighter sports gear and hit th ground running!
 
That’s it for today, we hope you were able to get some inspiration from our suggestions. Enjoy those long days and the first wiff of a summery breeze, and walk outsidewearing a few new colours!

So, you have a good shop and an excellent brand identity. You are engaging with your customers and you have a clear idea of what you are about. But you need products to sell and thinking of fresh ideas can be difficult. This is where hot topics research comes in handy. This short article is designed to help you find new ideas to keep your business growing and relevant.

The first step is to not forget your brand identity. Yes orange may be popular right now but your shop is all about blue and if you suddenly switch to orange you can turn off your existing customers, at least you would confuse them. So, whenever you do your hot topics research you have to keep in mind what your shop is about. Everything we suggest here is going to be simple and easy to implement as this is just an introduction.

First, keep your ears and eyes open. You may notice among your friends and family that certain trends, memes and other things may be suddenly popular. Also keep an eye on the news and on your various social sites. You may catch the next meme just as it is starting if you are observant enough. If you feel this meme or major event applies to your shop, take advantage of it and make designs and products around it. Being first on the scene with the t-shirt that has that new meme may make your year.

Second, we recommend you keep a close eye on your site’s analytics. If you have a separate website we suggest you install Google Analytics upon it. This will let you see how many visitors you have, and more importantly what they are searching for. Keep a very close eye on your search query report as it will let you see what is currently popular and is driving traffic to your site. If you find most of your customers are looking for “blue fish” then maybe it’s time to have some “blue fish” products?

Next, we suggest you keep a close eye on trending topics. Go to major social sites like twitter, Facebook, reddit and others to see what is currently popular or becoming popular. There are various tools and websites available to show you trending data and there’s websites like knowyourmeme.com that track meme’s as well. Overall, you just want to keep a close eye on trending topics and try to catch the wave. If you keep your ears and eyes open you will find topics that are highly relevant and could potentially make you a lot of money.

I have taken part in a hen night, too – last summer, a week before my wedding. I was so nervous before it started! In Germany it is common to play silly games with the bride, to make her wear strange outfits and to have her sell junk to strangers out of a vendor’s tray. I didn’t really want any of this stuff, especially wearing a bunny costume or something similar would have been a definite no go. But thanks to my great friends who organised the hen night, there was no need to be afraid, my hen night was great and so were our outfits. Of course, we had hen party t-shirts from Spreadshirt as you can see here:

Our wedding’s theme was “Royal Wedding”, that’s why my shirt says “Princess Victoria is getting married”. I loved it! And I also loved the whole day my friends had organised. We went on a “world tour” through our city, and every station we went to symbolised another country, where I had to experience typical wedding traditions from that country or continent. So, we went to “Europe”, symbolised by a park, where we ate a typical wedding cake and I threw a bouquet made of spring flowers. Among others, we also visited the United States, symbolised by the city’s tower (looking a little bit like the Empire State Building) and South America aka a club playing Latin music, where we danced all night and had a lot of fun.

All in all it was a really great day and I enjoyed it to the fullest. And what about you? What would be a typical hen or stag night tradition for your country, family or friends? Maybe you are getting married this year and you’re already afraid of the crazy costume you might have to wear? Well, why don’t you give your friends some helpful advice:  Get your outfits from Spreadshirt! You can find some inspiration on our pages forhen night t-shirts or stag night t-shirts or you can just create your own in the designer. Either way, with this piece of advice you can make sure that you won’t have to run around in a bunny costume on your hen party

With Spreadshirt, you can design your own leavers hoodies for your whole class or school. One of the advantages we offer is the possibility to design every hoodie differently. You could put the student’s name on his unique hoodie or include each student’s A-levels subjects in the design. And you can still get a volume discount starting from 6 products, even with different designs on every hoodie.

In addition, if you want to order leavers hoodies with the same print for every student, our bulk service team is here to help you. They offer individual quotes for orders with 50 products or more with the same print. And – we wouldn’t be Spreadshirt if we didn’t think about what customers want most – they also have the possibility to create the popular varsity design with your classmates names forming the year you finished school for you. So if you have been looking for a place to print your leavers hoodies with, go ahead and contact our bulk team here.

Of course there are also other possibilities to keep nice souvenirs of your school time. In Germany for example, it is common to get graduation t-shirts instead of leavers hoodies – So maybe, if one of your favourite subjects was German, you’d rather have some t-shirts printed? If that’s not the case, then another way to keep some memories of your classmates, your friends, your enemies and people you never spoke to would simply be to take a nice group picture, frame it and hang it on your wall – or keep it in a drawer to only take it out on special occasions In any case, don’t let your school time go by without a nice souvenir of it!

So you’ve developed your brand identity and you are interacting with your audience on Twitter and Facebook. So far, though, we have missed one major marketing platform: Google. Now it is time to tackle this area. Getting your shop and your products to show up in Google isn’t easy but you can dramatically increase your chances of showing up in relevant searches with a few simple steps.

The first thing you will need to do is do some basic keyword research. You know your products best but try to put yourself in a potential customer’s point of view. What terms would they use to find your product? Think long and hard on this, there are several tools that will help you with this such as Adwords Keyword Tool you can find at adwords.google.com.

Now, once you know what keywords you want to target say “Product-name T-Shirts”, you are going to take some basic steps so Google knows that your website is a good place for these terms. Remember, as smart as Google is they aren’t mind-readers and the robot Google uses to check webpages can’t always figure out what your website is about. This is why you need to give it as many hints as possible. When you create your product make sure the product name is descriptive and unique. Make sure the description includes a short but highly descriptive summary of what your product is. Using the keywords you researched earlier helps a lot for this. Furthermore, make sure that you fill out all the tags you can think as long as they are relevant to your product. If your product is about t-shirts, do not tag it with mugs, this will create confusion.

Google loves good, unique content and more of it you have on your page the better. If you are hosting your shop on your own website, it would be a good idea to write more content and start a blog that relates to your products. If Google’s robots crawls your page and finds a wealth of highly relevant content to a certain keyword it will make you rank for that keyword. Just remember to keep your content relevant and good. Do not simply repeat the keyword over and over again, check against spelling errors, and think of engaging content your readers would actually enjoy.

Want more information? Check out our Spreaducation section of our website: http://www.spreadshirt.com/spreaducation-marketing-C3558

Social Media is a buzz word lately and every business, small and large, is trying their best to make the best of it. Social media is a powerful tool because it allows you to directly connect to your audience for little to no cost. But it isn’t as easy as it seems. You cannot just get a twitter and assume people will flock to you. You have to ask yourself a fundamental question: What do you have to say that people want to hear?

Building up an audience on social networks is the most difficult thing one can do for themselves but it also pays off large dividends. Some people will just buy followers but that will get you nowhere. What makes social media valuable is how highly relevant your audience is. There’s no guess work, these are people who like you and want to hear what you have to say. So you have to make sure what you have to say is engaging.

First thing’s first: What does your audience what to hear? Sure, it may be nice for you to only talk about this week’s promo or this new product you’re pushing but why do people love you? Is it great designs? Is it witty jokes? Is it politically relevant content? Only you know what you do best, find that and embrace it on your social media.

Don’t be afraid to engage with your audience and talk back to them. See what they like and provide it to them.

Remember, content is king and you need to give your audience a reason to visit your page. From there, you have to find them. Talk to thought leaders in your industry, be personable and go to communities and forums that are about your area. Don’t rush things and don’t seem like you’re trying to simply gather followers. That will turn people off. Social media is about interacting with your audience and you must never forget that. Social media a great tool but if you misuse it, it will get you nowhere or could turn off your audience.

Thimo, who are you and what do you do when you aren’t developing plugins?

I am a media designer by trade, and I started up teaching myself to program software. For a while I have now been working for a company where I have created an ERP inventory control system. All in all it is not too much of a spectacular job, and it doesn’t involve parachuting, Walther PPK guns or dry martinis.

How did you come up with the idea of developing a new Wordpress plugin?

The internet doesn’t offer all that many plugins for Spreadshirt, and if you do happen to find one it is either discontinued, limited to iFrames, can only be used to display products or costs a lot of money. That was a bit annoying. And I thought it was time to do something about it. So I decided to create my own plugin that offers quite a few functions as well as the possibility to create your own plugins on top.

What can the plugin do?

So far it cannot make you tea, but it has the following functionality:

• Show product descriptions
• Show a preview of the design (similar to the Spreadshirt Marketplace)
• Colour and size selection for a given product (design colour remains constant)
• Price listing
• Navigation through so-called endless scrolling, so that the products of the following page will be shown immediately once you hit the bottom of a page.
• Twitter & Facebook integration
• Language support in German, French and English
• Shopping basket runs through Spreadshirt (a click on the shopping basket first opens Spreadshirt’s shopping basket and initiates the checkout procedure).

Which advantages does the plugin offer?

You can easily tie in the plugin with an existing site whilst keeping total control over the sites visuals. You can use a separate stylesheet that can be adjusted to taste.

Who can use it?

Anyone who knows how to use Wordpress and has administrative rights for a site.

Where do you find it?

Just log into wordpress, then click on ‘plugins’ and ‘install’. You will find a little search function where you can enter ’WP-Spreadplugin’, and off you go. Alternatively you can get access by using this link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-spreadplugin/

Which languages and currencies are supported?

Languages are read out by Wordpress and then transferred to the plugin, and the plugin itself is currently available in English, French and German. In terms of currencies it gets the information directly from Spreadshirt, and it can use all the currencies that are available with Spreadshirt.

Are there any more functions for this plugin to come?

At the moment there is nothing in the pipeline, but I can always react to new requirements at short notice. So if there should be any demand for a new feature or functionality, I will take pleasure in making it happen.

What requirements are necessary in order to use it?

You need Wordpress – at best the newest version. This should be in place for reasons of data safety. And:
A Spreadshirt Shop
A Spreadshirt API-Key and ‘secret’ can be found here:
US/NA: https://www.spreadshirt.com/-C6840
EU: https://www.spreadshirt.de/-C7120
In case you have any questions, please pay me a visit on my website or ping me on Facebook or Twitter. The information you need you will find here: http://www.pr3ss-play.de/
(PS – check out my shop )

So you decided upon starting your own Spreadshirt store? Great! But you have found that despite your many great designs you have not yet been able to make many sales? Spreadshirt understands this and that is why we are putting together a weekly series to help you make the best of your shop. Our first blog entry in this series will be how you should go about building your brand.

Remember, on the internet you’re just one store of many and it can be very hard to get your message out there. The first thing you should consider is what your store is about. Are you a fun or serious store? Are you about telling funny jokes or promoting a particular political campaign you care about? The very first step to marketing yourself is developing a clear idea about what you are about. We call this building up a brand identity. How do you want your customers to know you?

After you sorted out what you want to say you need to figure out how you’re going to say it. Let’s say you decided that your company is about funny t-shirts targeted towards teenagers. You are going to have to build your brand entirely around that. Think long about what your target audience wants and how you want to present yourself to them. Think of an enduring name then build a nice logo around it. Remember, you want it to be simple and to tell your audience exactly what you do at a glance. Make it overly complicated or unrelated to what you do, you will lose brand identity from the start. When someone looks at your shop name and logo they should have a good idea what you do. Furthermore, your logo should be interesting and should provoke some sort of emotion.

From here, you need to cultivate that identity. You need to engage with your customers actively and to promote products that showcase your brand identity. If your brand is about funny t-shirts remember to promote those first. You should join social networks and communities about funny t-shirts and you should generally promote yourself with your targeted audience. Build up your own content and actively engage with your customers. You want to cultivate an identity with your audience; you want them to know your quality and your close association with what you do.

This may seem simple but many people neglect this when they start a new shop. You cannot just be anybody, you have to be a brand, and you have to be somebody. You have to set yourself apart and putting a little bit of thought into how you present yourself to your audience will pay large dividends in the future. Focus on quality and on presenting a clear message to your audience and you will build up a great brand.