Teepay advice by David Hieatt
tim posted this 10th July 2009 6:38pm

This little welsh bugger makes me laugh more than most. If he went fishing on a day when there were no fish he’d still come back with a boat full. He’s just designed a tee shirt, not under his own name, and it sold 280 in a week. If he’d done that on teepay.com he’d be £700 better off. good designs sell, and will always sell if you tell enough people about them. It’s called networking. Go and get those those sales if you’ve got the talent. If a valley boy from dragon land can do it then so can you, maybe. It’s wound me up this success.
July 11th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
… but I’m almost certain that this t-shirt wouldn’t have sold at all on teepay. Unless it was given the howies seal of approval by being picked as t-shirt of the day.
July 11th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
james, howies does not give a seal of approval, it just makes choices, some that appeal to some and some that dont appeal to some. great ideas are great ideas, the labels are irrelevant but seem to matter to some folks for some strange reason. If howies was a seal of approval we should theoretically sell out of everything we make which we dont so to get back to my point. david designed a teeshirt, it didn’t have his name on it or any reference that could be traced to him, and it outsold all our other teeshirts for the past few months by a mile, showing that a great idea will sell teehirts, not always a brand or a label or someones name. that to me is the great thing about teepay, it’s open source.
July 12th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
I think the reason this will sell is that it’s available NOW (or was when it was picked and this blog post made). I agree with James in that if it was uploaded to teepay and left on it’s own, it probably wouldn’t have made 30 orders, so not be printed.
I’ve been thinking a lot about teepay. I have loads of ideas but don’t want to submit them until it looks like there is a big enough customer base to make it likely that 30 will be ordered within 2 week period (or whatever the time frame is).
I wonder how many other ‘designers’ are holding off in a similar way.
July 12th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
hutch, the whole idea about teepay that needs to be grasped is the networking of your own designs, not the reliance of teepay to sell your shirt. if you have great designs they will sell if you let enough people about them. your missing the point if you are waiting for traffic, there’s so much traffic on teepay already it’s ridiculous, the missing ingredient is the networking of your won designs through the social networking websites. designers are not holding off, they are already on it hutch, check previous blogs and posts to see that.
July 12th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
I get the idea that designers need to network their designs, and with a couple of great designs up myself, I didn’t do enough networking obviously ! But as a consumer I agree with hutch. I like some designs but never quite get round to ordering because hardly any make it to the 30 mark so you just tend to think I wont bother to order because it will never get printed. It’s the staff pick that propels it to the forefront & hence orders. Being available ‘now’ is a big incentive to order. What’s the minimum number of orders needed to make it viable to make the screens, or could any tee that has some orders stay live for longer to get exposure ?
And I guess a lot of the designers putting stuff up just like designing stuff & are not necessarily up on the whole networking/ promotion thing. If you are getting substantially more orders for the designs you highlight and there are not similar amounts for the ones that are self promoted perhaps that suggests that this is the case.
July 12th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I wasn’t saying that it’s not a great shirt. It’s a great shirt. Just saying that because it’s a ‘howies’ shirt it sells. And it’s available to buy straight away. If it was on teepay, by an anonymous designer, it wouldn’t have reached 30 sales, judging by how things have gone so far.
What happens if a designer doesn’t social network? Does that mean that a great t-shirt design won’t sell unless it’s flung around on facebook, twitter etc? Tim, you say that the ‘missing ingredient is networking’? That doesn’t seem to be very ‘howies’. I’m too busy out on my bicycle, wearing my howies ’social not working’ t-shirt, to be social networking. Perhaps I’m just not cut out for this teepay lark.