Comments on: Teepay advice by David Hieatt

By: james

james — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 21:06:19 +0000

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.

By: derek

derek — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:39:32 +0000

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.

By: tim

tim — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:38:53 +0000

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.

By: Hutch

Hutch — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 14:39:33 +0000

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.

By: tim

tim — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:15:10 +0000

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.

By: james

james — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 12:17:08 +0000

… 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.