Interesting story over at behance from the folks who run I’m A Hot Tee that talks about their experiences using social media (youtube) to kickstart sales with their store.
“In the t-shirt business, companies live or die by one thing: Whether or not their marketing plan works.
Launching I’m a Hot Tee entirely out of pocket, I had a limited budget for marketing, and really want to make sure that every dollar was well-spent. I had just read Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant book The Tipping Point, and it gave me a number of ideas.
One of them was to use YouTube as a marketing platform.
It has gone better than I ever could have dreamed.
What I did was by no means perfect, but it is a really terrific case study, I think, and might be of use to you guys. So here’s the story of how I used YouTube to sell sixty shirts the night I launched.”
Read the whole thing here.
Also, The Tipping Point, and a few other of Gladwell’s books, sit on my bookshelves. It’s definitely some good reading for anyone who’s in the midst of starting their own clothing line.
Targeting a distinctly upscale crowd, the designs from Cassida are inspired by the culture and artwork of ancient Rome and given a modern twist.
Most of the prints are lavish multi-color affairs and some include foil and embellishments. All of them are printed on high quality tees.
With the least expensive shirt priced right around 85 euro, the price is a killer for us - even WITH the euro gaining on the dollar, but we’re also not part of the target market.
Even so, right now they’re offering a discount of 20% off your order for the entire month of December: use code discount20 when you checkout.
Blake from YouDesignIt (a previous contributor to PCT) has just written another great article for JustCreativeDesign on prepping your artwork for t-shirt printing:
“As many of you probably already know, doing graphic design, and doing graphic design specifically for t-shirt printing can be two totally different beasts. Have you ever worked extremely hard for long hours on a t-shirt design for yourself or a client, only to have the printer tell you that your design won’t work for t-shirt printing? This problem is not that uncommon and I would like to provide you with a few easy tips on how to prepare your artwork for printing on t-shirts.”
Great stuff, Blake!
While fashion has always come from Paris, Milan, and other parts of Europe, I think it’s safe to say that the graphic t-shirt as it exists today has distinctly American origins.
And because tee design by nature is such a strong reflection of pop culture, we really dig looking at clothing lines that come from around the world.
DRUKS is a line out of Paris, France who’s slogan is “Cool Tees for Fresh Kids.” (Don’t worry, they do a great job with writing their site both in French AND english.)
Besides having an (unhealthy?) obsession with beer (they even have a question on their faq dedicated to it: “Why is Druks Logo a beer bottle?” “Because Beer is Good.”) their line is distinguished by great iconic, over-sized prints on bright colors:
Also rarely seen on clothing line sites here in the states, DRUKS has an official Anthem project:
“The concept is easy: Bring different artists together to create songs for our brand. Show to everybody that we like what they do and that they like what we do. And stay always creative.”
And the music (free mp3) is actually really good.
Super!
