Apr 29, 2015 •Permalink

Freshly Laundered 024 / Katie Campbell

Katie Campbell lives and works in beautiful Savannah, Georgia. As a Senior Designer at SCAD who does freelance t-shirt design and illustration on the side, she wears a lot of hats in her professional life. Read on to see how she balances both gigs.

CB: In your day job you’re a Senior Designer for SCAD, but you also do a lot of freelance apparel design. How’d you get into the freelance stuff?

KC: I slowly picked up freelance jobs shortly after graduating in 2004. I had enough clients in 2007 that I decided to try freelancing full-time. I was doing really well, but when the opportunity for a full-time gig at my alma mater presented itself, I couldn’t resist. I really craved the group creative environment and missed those beautiful benefits. After I started, I found I was doing less personal work so I began submitting to Threadless. Once I started getting prints sold through Threadless and other big name brands, the work requests starting rolling in. I discovered my love for merch design for the music industry and tried to focus my freelance jobs in that field. It’s such a rush and dream come true to see my work approved and sold by musicians that have inspired and entertained me all of my life.

CB: Is there a musician or band you have been dying to design for but haven’t gotten the chance to design for yet?

KC: I would love to do work for Madonna, Beyonce, and Ani DiFranco.

CB: You’ve had designs up on Threadless, Cotton Bureau, Society6, Design By Humans - how are you so prolific? Where do you come up with the inspiration for all these different designs and how do you find the time to complete them all while working a full-time job?!

KC: I get that question all the time. I surprise myself with how much I get done in one day. Even though my day job is creative and demanding, I wouldn’t feel satisfied if I didn’t make the time to create what I want at night and on weekends. My inspiration comes from everything and anything. I love being involved with Threadless because they have themed competitions that help drive my concept and surround me with other talented artists from around the world. I have piles of scrap paper, notes in my phone and cryptic emails I’ve sent to myself with ideas for my next design. I’d go crazy if I didn’t attempt to bring those ideas to life. And it just so happens to make me a little extra cash.

CB: Are you a part of any professional or design communities? If so, what do you get out of those experiences?

KC: I am not currently a part of a professional design community. If I lived in a bigger city with a local AIGA chapter, I would pay to join again. I love all of the local events they host. I am a member of dribbble.com, which is like a show and tell for designers. I constantly get inspiration and discover new talents from all over the globe. It’s also a great source for showcasing your work for feedback or simply sharing with other amazing artists and studios. I highly recommend it.

CB: If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring designers, what would it be?

KC: Never stop making and sharing your work. Make yourself visible on the web. Get involved in design communities where other experienced designers can provide feedback and where reputable companies actively seek artists. Stay positive and don’t let internet trollers get you down.

CB: Thanks Katie!

To see more of Katie’s work you can check out her website, or follow her on twitter, dribbble, and instagram.

Apr 15, 2015 •Permalink

Freshly Laundered 018 / Neven Mrgan

Neven Mrgan has created such memorable games as Blackbar, The Incident, and Space Age. Based in Portland, Oregon he works as a designer at Panic Inc and enjoys cooking creative dishes for his family come dinner time. Read on to see how he balances work, family, and designing games we all love to play.

CB: Your day job is as a Designer at Panic Inc. How do you find time to design iOS games on the side?

NM: My usual answer to this is, “by being a terrible father and husband.” (NOTE: THIS IS A JOKE.) I suppose the truth is that I don’t have many other hobbies, except cooking: I come home from work, hang out with the family while making dinner, help put the kids to bed, then cook some more while I check on the computer in between pot-stirrings. I also try to focus on projects that are small enough in scope that I can tackle them in my spare time.

CB: Ha! An iOS game or app does not seem like a project that is small in scope. Designing a logo for a friends new brand, sure, creating an entire game with multiple levels seems like quite the undertaking! Space Age was announced on the Big Bucket Software blog in 2012, and launched in November of 2014. What was it like working on a project like that for over two years?

NM: *gulp* It was closer to three and a half years.

After our first game, The Incident, Matt and I had decided to do something bigger and more ambitious—that much was guaranteed. We figured Space Age might take twelve to eighteen months to put together. What we didn’t count on was the odd kind of progress you make with a story-driven game: you have to keep switching between the micro mode of solving THIS technical challenge or writing THIS puzzle, and the grand view of story flow and, for lack of a less pretentious word, meaning. It felt like solving a Rubik’s cube in that moving one piece also moved a bunch of others, and then we had to go back and shift them all. Of course, with a real Rubik’s cube, you develop certain tactics that help you get around that issue (so I’ve read on Wikipedia, anyway). We hadn’t worked on large games before, so we had to do our learning along the way.

In the end, the finished game took much longer than we expected, but it was also better than we expected. We joke that, had you told us in 2011 what kind of game we were signing up for, we would’ve politely declined to make it. I’m glad we didn’t.

CB: Wow! That’s a lot of time and effort to put towards a side project. Do you feel like it was worth it? How has the reception been for Space Age from the general populus?

NM: It was definitely worth doing. I hope it doesn’t sound like it was some torturous, nightmare project. We had fun the whole time (including the “gaaah if I can only figure out this one thing…!” kind of “fun”, of course.) What pushed it over the edge of “part-time project” and into that zone where it seems like something bigger and better than me was the soundtrack, composed by Cabel Sasser. Hearing his wonderful take on our little game scenes, after years of slowly progressing from “hey that’s a cute idea for a game” to a “uhh this is now a complex piece of software" made it all magical again.

I’m always glad to hear that people know about our games, happy to see that they’ve actually played them, tickled pink when they finish them, and straight-up flabbergasted when they do things like make fan art or post videos of their kids hacking at them. A story-driven game that’s a bit different than the usual stuff on iOS is a tall order, I understand that; when people take the time to try it, and then feel that their gamble has paid off, it just crushes me, in that “glad to be alive” sense.

CB: Space Age recently launched for Mac as well. Will you continue to iterate there, or are you moving on to something else? What’s your next big undertaking?

NM: Matt and I use iOS and Mac OS every day, and we like bringing our projects to both platforms, especially since Apple’s development tools make it easy. Space Age for Mac is interesting to me because it’s a little closer to many of the games that inspired it: Cannon Fodder, Command & Conquer, mouse-controlled graphic adventures.

We hope to keep making new games for as long as we can. Our next project might be something smaller, something faster, something stranger, but it will be definitely be different. That’s something I care about: making each project a new challenge for me, and a new surprise for the audience.

I’m also excited to work on more story-driven, text-heavy games with my other game-making partner, James Moore. Right now, I’m enjoying the idea of “writing” as well as “designing” and “drawing”.

CB: Where do you draw inspiration from when you’re designing games, other than the games you previously mentioned?

NM: I try to read as much and as broadly as I can, and I certainly hope that my interest in popular science, sci-fi, and existentialism informs my games. Growing up, I read every comic I ever saw, which included many indie titles and stuff that’s a little less superhero-based. My goal is to create approachable, friendly stories and mechanics, but it’s best if they have a little edge to them, a little aberration you’d never find at Disneyland.

My art style is inspired by graphic design and fine art more than by illustration or game art per se. I’m more concerned with composition, balance, and visual metaphor than with realism or cuteness.

CB: You mentioned earlier that you enjoy cooking, what’s your favorite meal to make for your family? Why?

NM: A recent favorite of The Mrgans is chicken tikka masala pizza. It satisfies my craving for making dough, my wife’s fondness for Indian food, and our daughter’s obvious addiction to pizza in any form. And while we live in a particularly restaurant-rich area of food-crazy Portland, this isn’t something we can find easily if we go out to eat.

I once had to explain what kind of love it is that I have for things like Mystery Science Theater 3000, the Finnish band Circle, and the film The Navigator. These are some of my favorite things in the world, but they’re not “perfect”; they’re decidedly flawed. It occurred to me that loving something like this doesn’t mean thinking it ideal, but being attached to it on some emotional/intellectual level enough to defend it nevertheless. So when my pizza-purist friends roll their eyes at the idea of Indian pizza, I will defend it, because while it’s a wackadoodle dish, I love it.

Various places you can find Neven on the world wide web: twitter, instagram, and tumblr. Wanna see his Space Age or Blackbar tee come back? Sign up on their respective pages.

Apr 10, 2015 •Permalink

Freshly Laundered 023 / Matt Braun

Senior Designer Matt Braun lives and works just down the street from us here in Pittsburgh. As part of the team at Bearded he designs award winning websites for clients near and far. Here we’ve interviewed him about his love of Type and his work in relation to that.

CB: Here at CB we’ve been supporters of Wood Type Revival since the very beginning. Tell us, how did you come to fall in love with Type?

MB: Aw, thanks guys. I don’t think I was fully able to appreciate the intricacies of type until I got hooked on letterpress. Most of my early career was web work, and at that time the type choices were fairly limited. I started letterpress so I could work with type and design on something that wasn’t a computer. As I started collecting type and interacting with it in the physical form, I came to admire all the fine details that make a face unique. For example: French Octagon, one of my favorite faces from the project. It’s such a unique take on the traditional Mansard style. The thickness of the horizontal strokes gives it that commanding presence, and helped the face stand out in those 19th century newspapers. I haven’t seen anything like it before or since. And we unearthed it right here in the South Side of Pittsburgh!

CB: Where do you usually find new fonts for your letterpress? Is that the sort of thing you can snag on Craigslist/eBay? Come across one in an unusual place

MB: Are you asking me to reveal my secrets? Well ok, it’s on the internet so I guess it can be easily deleted if I regret it, right? I’ve found most of my type on Craigslist. I search regularly and try to go check out any leads that might have letterpress related items. I’ve bought a lot of type and equipment from the old shops around town that were closing down like Magnetic press, Admore press, Olah press and the late hobby printer Dan Tarr.

I’ve also just walked into print shops and asked them if they have anything to sell. Matt Griffin and I walked into a shop in Buffalo, NY once and asked if they had any letterpress items to which they responded by laughing at us. I first thought they were just going to tell us to go away but turns out they had one of the largest collections of metal type I’ve ever seen. We’re talking rooms of wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, cabinets of type. Twenty or thirty years ago that would of been common, but not now.

Occasionally, I will find something rare on eBay that I can’t pass up but that usually comes at a high price tag. I wouldn’t say I’ve found any in an unusual place but the quality of stuff I’ve found in common places has been pretty amazing.

CB: Do you have a favorite typeface? Do you look for different things in a typeface you’d use for web design versus one you’d use for a letterpress project?

MB: I wouldn’t say I have a favorite typeface although I’m definitely partial to mansards, shaded faces, and extended gothics. We also have two wood type scripts in the Bearded collection that I always find myself trying to include in projects.

The process of choosing a typeface has a lot to do with tone, rhythm, and contrast (among other concerns). In letterpress, you often have to resort to using what’s in your cabinets and making it work. Because I’m mostly designing posters, decisions are largely aesthetically based, and depending on the project might not have to be legible. Many times I will try to achieve a certain rhythm for the layout and subject matter. For the web, there are a lot of practical concerns for the medium. Readability, how it renders at smaller sizes or different browsers or devices, number of weights, and performance often play into the decision after tone has been established.

CB: Do you have any new personal projects coming up that you’re excited about?

MB: No, nothing specific at the moment. We have a lot of exciting things happening at Bearded right now and with a baby, I have my hands full. I did recently start selling prints under the name of Outdated Press with my friend Dan Maldonado. So I’ve been trying to get into the shop a bit more to print. There might be a series of prints based on the wood type collection coming up but nothing definite yet.

CB: Speaking of kids, do you hope to pass on your love of type to your son? Do you think you’ll have him in the workshop with you in a few years?

MB: Currently, he is the heir to a small fortune in type and over a ton in cast iron presses, I hope he loves it! If not, thats ok, I hope he sells and uses the money for something that he enjoys.

It will be a little while before I get him into the shop, letterpress is not the safest of hobbies to have. But when he’s ready, I will make him sit through hour long monotone lectures about the craft. Kids love that, right?

CB: They definitely do! Thanks for chatting with us Matt.

To see what Matt is up to, you can find him on twitter, instagram, dribbble, or his personal site. You can also check out projects he is involved with: Wood Type Revival, Outdated Press, What Comes Next Is The Future.

Apr 2, 2015 •Permalink

So You Want to Make Even More T-Shirts

Selling t-shirts online has never been easier. We’re here to help you do it at scale.

Welcome to the third in what is apparently a never-ending series of posts on how to sell t-shirts. If this is your first rodeo, you may want read parts one and two before diving in.

Five years ago we launched a t-shirt store by the name of United Pixelworkers. In a good month, we sold 50 shirts. Fast-forward to 2013, and we could boast of averaging 50 sales every couple days. Today, Cotton Bureau sells 50 shirts every eight hours. Our little online retail experiment has mutated from a tiny side project to the ink-guzzling engine of this fiercely independent, self-funded, small-but-growing company. Yeah, that doesn’t happen by accident. Let’s talk about the trials and tribulations of quintupling your sales.

That’s gold, Jerry! Gold!

We told you you wouldn’t get rich selling t-shirts unless you struck gold. Those of you rubbing your hands together as you fantasize about your future t-shirt empire, stop it right now. Have you ever flipped real estate? Caught the right penny stock just before it took off? Hit the scratch-and-win jackpot? No? Well your odds of making a million bucks selling t-shirts this year aren’t much better. Anybody who tells you otherwise is using you. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t earn a few dollars on the side or maybe even pay your mortgage. Just keep in mind that it’s taken us nearly 2,000 days and nights of hard work to reach the magical $1 million in annual gross revenue, and, yeah, we don’t get to keep most of that.

Money, money, money.

So where does it all go? Shirt prices haven’t changed much if any over the years, which means unless you’re cutting and sewing, material cost is going to be a big chunk—maybe the bulk—of your expenses. As with most things, you get what you pay for. Want a brand-name tee? Want it made in America? Want reliable selection and diverse color options? Like your tees soft? Want ‘em to last? Prepare to pay more.

For most businesses, labor is the number one expense. If you’re clever, you might be able to keep those numbers down. Instagram famously had only 13 employees when they sold to Facebook. Getting a physical product out the door requires boots on the ground, so to speak, but we’ve managed to ship several thousands items each month for the price of one part-time employee. Whether you’re buying software or writing it yourself, never underestimate the leverage of a good application.

We’ve got one other trick up our sleeves when it comes to holding the line on cost: we live and work in beautiful western Pennsylvania, home of pierogis, Primanti’s, and Buster Olney’s pick to win the 2015 World Series, the Pittsburgh Pirates. It also happens to be the most affordable city in the world, according to some people. That means we get to have an office / warehouse in the most walkable (and delicious) neighborhood in town, the Strip District. We pay $18sf for a luxurious, well-lit, wood-floored, exposed-brick, 10ft-ceilinged work nirvana. That’s awfully tough to beat.

Every business must choose where to allocate its budget. Ours goes to printing the best possible shirts right here in town and paying ourselves and the many, many wonderful people who have chosen to share their designs on Cotton Bureau fairly and sustainably.

Product

The thing you’re selling on your site, the one you put in the box that goes out the door, is the tangible expression of your product. It might not be the only thing people pay you for, but it’s still kind of important. If you want to print direct-to-the-cheapest-garment-you-can-find, we can’t really help you. If you’re looking for soft-feel, crazy-good tees printed with slavish attention to detail and buckets of affection, well, we’re happy to say we still work with the same shop that we did two years ago. They haven’t let us down yet and, to be honest, really go out of their way to be accommodating. We’ve referred dozens of people to them. Nobody has been disappointed with their service. You can’t go wrong working with Clockwise.

Assuming you came here to read about selling t-shirts, you probably also need mockups. We can help with that. Get your officially-licensed Cotton Bureau mockups now on Creative Market.

You won’t have any trouble finding Photoshop tutorials on the Internet or articles teaching you how to identify that untapped niche, but designing a good shirt is an art not a science. It needs to come from the heart. Work hard, share what you’re doing (ping us privately or even publicly on Dribbble—we’re always happy to advise), and never be afraid to fail. The t-shirt market may be crowded, but we’ve always got room for one more.

Setting Up Shop

When we launched Cotton Bureau in 2013, it wasn’t possible to drive a pre-order sales model using off-the-shelf (or even a hosted) software. As far as we know, the situation hasn’t improved since then. If you’re doing something unconventional, you may need to roll your own shop. If you’re sticking to the beaten path, however, you’ve got your choice of solid options. Traditional storefronts are a great fit for Shopify (still our recommendation), Big Cartel, Magento, Big Commerce, Storenvy, etc. You’ll need to do your homework to decide which is the best fit for you. In addition to basic order processing and inventory management, you’ll get the benefit of paid support, vibrant communities, third-party plugins, and constant improvement. No matter if you’re selling one shirt or thousands, it’s never been easier to sell your stuff online.

Speaking of never being easier to sell stuff online, don’t forget about more managed marketplaces like Etsy and eBay. There’s something to be said for letting someone else do some of the dirty work for you. It’s even possible to run your store directly on your favorite social network. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr… they all have or are building support for payment processing. It’s hard to argue against going straight to the people.

What about skipping the whole shop thing and listing your designs directly on a bona fide t-shirt market? We’ve got good news here. When last we spoke, your options for turnkey t-shirt printing and sales were distinctly fewer than they are today. Zazzle, Spreadshirt, RedBubble, Society6, Threadless, etc are still around if you’re into that kind of thing. But now you’ve also got a new, pre-order driven breed in Teespring, Booster, and, of course, yours truly. Some are screen-printing only, others offer direct-to-garment. With some you make a little money, with others you can make a lot. Some are all about community, others aren’t. We ain’t gonna break ‘em all down for you today (and you thought nothing was beyond the scope of this post). You’re just going to have to dig a little deeper if you’re intrigued. Or, you know, you could just send us your design right now since you’re already here.

Hosting

Set up shop with a company like Shopify (noticing a theme?), and you’re good to go. You’ll have access to a huge variety of third-party add-ons, you can pick an existing look or design your own, and you won’t have to wake up in the middle of the night to burp the server. At some point though, you might find that what you want to do just isn’t possible if you’re using somebody else’s platform. When (and if) that time comes, we cannot recommend any hosting company more highly than we do Linode. Like everyone else on this list, they aren’t perfect. But they’re really, really good. Fast, cheap virtual hosting is a great option if you know what you’re doing. You can grab a shared host like Media Temple (we’ve used them in the past; you could definitely do worse) if you want to go that route, or you can get really hands-on and go full colo like Stack Exchange, but for people that aren’t doing top 100 Alexa traffic, it’s really hard to beat Linode. We were previously on Slicehost (Rackspace disappeared them), and some people like Digital Ocean, but Linode has terrific performance bang for your buck, solid support, and, hmm, well, acceptable UI. The interface that won’t give Stripe a run for its money, but it just may be better than the other hosting UIs out there. Tell ‘em we sent you, and we’ll get $20 if you stick around for 90 days. I don’t know what you get, but that’s not really important.

Marketing

As if designing a shirt and getting a shop set up wasn’t hard enough, now you actually have to convince people to buy what you’re selling. Here’s a lesson in economics for you: the easier it becomes to manufacture something, the more of it will exist. This might not sound like news, but have you noticed how easy it is to pump out the tweets and photos and “content” these days? The supply of things vying for your attention is effectively infinite. Everyone, everywhere wants it, and once they have it, they want to sell you something. Now you’re one of them. What do you do?

There’s no shortage of things to say about marketing. Entire, you know, books have been written about it, and we’re not going to turn this into a “10 Tips for Sales & Marketing” article. That being said, we have a marketing philosophy we’d like to share with you. Marketing can be divided into two big buckets: strategy and tactics. You can spend the rest of your life learning tactics: funnels, paid advertising, earned and organic media, how to pitch yourself, etc. You can shout into the void on Twitter and Facebook. You can do what we did and send your Internet heroes free t-shirts. You can release a making-of video on Instagram or Vimeo. You can conjure up publicity stunts or email people with popular blogs or stand on the corner of a street holding a sign. All of those things are good. Some will be more successful than others. Strategically, however, you need to take a hard look in the mirror and decide who you are and why you’re doing this. Is your design any good? Will the world be better because of the shirt you’re promoting? If the answer is yes, then tell people. Tell them why you made the shirt, why they need it, why what you’re doing is unique. There’s no shame in reading this and deciding it isn’t for you.

Pricing & Discounts

Let’s talk about pricing. You’re going to be tempted to go cheap. Don’t do that. You’re not Amazon. You won’t make it up on volume, trust us. Sell something you’re not ashamed of, price it fairly. And don’t over do it with the discounts. Sure, a promotion here and there is necessary. Sales bring the customers to the yard. What happens, though, when your fans have been conditioned to expect sale prices? They aren’t sales anymore, that’s what. That’s your new retail price. Retail is now a synonym for ripoff. Please don’t teach people to expect a coupon or sale before they buy. You’re only hurting yourself. That said, here are some things we’ve found that work:

Discounts in exchange for subscribing to the newsletter. You are periodically sending out a newsletter, right? You don’t need to give away the farm (we do 10% off your first purchase; if you haven’t signed up yet, quit reading and do that now), and you don’t need to stop people dead in their tracks with a pop up (we have a simple banner at the top of the site that converts like crazy).
Free shipping. If you can’t afford to lose money today in the hope of making it up tomorrow, you have to run the numbers before offering free shipping. Repeat after me: You have to run the numbers before offering free shipping. Free shipping is a powerful elixir. You’ll be shocked how many more orders you get with free shipping, but more orders don’t do you a whole lot of good if you’re losing money. Remember what we talked about. Unless your brother is hand-delivering packages, shipping costs real money. Because we’re effectively splitting profits with our designers, eating shipping really cuts to the bone. When we do offer it, it’s conditional: half-price shipping if you order two items, free shipping (domestically) if you buy three or more. This is a common move among independent designers that benefits everyone. Customers get a break if they buy more, retailers get to make a few bucks more than they would otherwise. Even Amazon requires spending at least $25 or signing up for a Prime membership to receive free shipping. Again, this is strong medicine. Use with caution.
Affiliates. So… our little referral trial sorta worked and sorta didn’t. We definitely found some new customers, which is great, but discount sites scraped those codes straightaway, which is less great (see pricing discussion above). Overall, it more or less worked as expected. We’re hoping to try it again someday with a few tweaks.

Advertising

While we’re talking pricing and discounts, we might as well hit ads too. Ugh. Advertising is torture, isn’t it? A whole lot of short-term pain for what you can only hope will be an equivalent amount of long-term gain. Here’s the bottom line with advertising: never buy an ad you can’t afford unless you’re willing to bet the company on it. Seriously, whether you’re looking at a podcast ad, a display ad, a native ad, or even a more traditional move like magazine, television, and radio ads, you just aren’t going to see the kinds of immediate returns you need at our size. Standard caveats apply. If you’ve got a bankroll that allows you to not be concerned with turning a profit today, then by all means, light it on fire. Not all ads are worthless. The more clever and unexpected your ad, the better it’s going to do. Maybe if you’re some kind of advertising genius you’ll fare better than we have. We expect to have more, um, useful information on advertising as we continue taking our knocks.

Payment Processing

Whether you use a store like Shopify or roll your own thing like we do, you’re going to need someone to process all those payments. Previously we used PayPal, Amazon, and, for other projects, Braintree (now owned by PayPal), but ever since Stripe came to town we’ve been all in with them. It literally does not get easier than using Stripe. Every interaction we’ve had with them has been fantastic. Their terms are more than fair. Your bank will try to talk you into some arcane merchant services company whose technology will make you cry because they promise same-day payouts and low, low processing fees. Well, don’t do it. Yes, seeing what credit card fees look like will make you cringe, but you’ll pay for it in other ways if you sign up for one of those dinosaurs. And hey, look on the bright side: when you start selling a few thousand shirts each month Stripe will reach out to offer you better rates anyway.

Inventory

Going pre-order only is a bold move. It’s an elegant solution to the inventory problem, but it’s not for the faint of heart. The traditional way of selling is to make (or buy) a whole bunch of something, toss it in a pile, and have it ready to go out the door at a moment’s notice. That isn’t so bad if you’re our bff Aaron Draplin and half of what you’re selling is one-size-fits-all doodads. T-shirts though? Yeah, have fun with that. The most popular sizes are going to be men’s medium, large, and extra large, so stock up on those. But you want to sell to everyone, right? Well then you’ve got to have men’s small, maybe even extra small, men’s 2X–5X, plus a whole range of women’s sizes (let’s not even get started on how hard it is to find a women’s apparel manufacturer that can reliably stock a wide range of colors in sizes that actual adult women can wear). Hey, you’re up for a challenge though, so why not. Let’s see now that’s, um, at least nine sizes if you’re ignoring 20% of the population across—wait, how many designs will you be selling? Things get out of hand pretty quickly when you start offering Ugmonk-levels of product. We’re talking shelves on shelves on shelves just to have the bare minimum in stock. Which brings us to…

Fulfillment

Short of outsourcing fulfillment to Amazon or Shipwire, you’re going to be packing those shirts yourself. That’s not a bad thing if you care about quality. Here at Cotton Bureau World Headquarters, shirts come in and shirts go out every day. We’ve been using (and improving) our hand-rolled fulfillment software to bulk pack since 2011. Frankly it’s super-awesome and you all should be so lucky. That said, not all orders are created equal. Most are small, but some are medium, some are large, some are even extra large. If you’re selling more than just t-shirts, you’ve also got to account for crushables, breakables, and things that just don’t fit neatly into a poly-mailer. Our top-secret, highly classified system automatically slices-and-dices outgoing orders into correctly sized packages. If you’re going with a straight inventory model, you likely won’t be grabbing 50 tee stacks of men’s large, so it won’t make as much sense to bulk pack. You might as well pick-and-pack until your outgoing order volume gets insane. If you do decide to ship yourself, we still have nothing but good things to say about ShipStation. That’s what Ugmonk uses. Let us know when you start selling more shirts than Jeff.

Shipping

Shipping is where the sales rubber really meets the customer road, or something like that. Here’s what you need to know about shipping: it sucks. You optimistically put your package in the hands of your local postman or woman and cross your fingers it will arrive at your customer’s front door. Domestically (that’s in the U.S. for us) that’s a pretty safe bet. That doesn’t mean, however, that we don’t spend hours every week talking on the phone with the postal service waiting to find out what we already know: they have no idea where your package is. Shipping internationally may as well be shipping to another planet. Fully one quarter of our sales are international. We offer only the cheapest, first class mail service because shipping across an ocean is expensive no matter how you slice it. The reality is packages are going to get lost, all the time, even in first-world, fully industrialized, how-is-this-even-possible countries. If that sounds dire, that’s because it is. The situation has become frustrating to the point that we’re actively investigating more reliable shipping methods even at the risk of increased cost. Shipping is part of the cost of buying independent. As with everything else, we’d rather charge more than provide a worse experience. If you plan to sell and ship things, you’re going to have to make the same difficult decisions.

As far as managing (USPS) postage, we can recommend both Stamps.com and Endicia. We used Endicia for several years until recently switching to Stamps.com. You really can’t go wrong with either. For our purposes, Stamps.com was an improvement because it let us move everything to the server rather than whatever computer we happened to have laying around. If you choose to go in that direction, you’ll definitely want to take a look at RocketShip.it (what we use) and EasyPost (what we might have maybe used if it was cheaper when it first came out). (Word to the wise: international shipping has extra forms you’ll need to fill and doing it by hand is cray cray. Germany even requires a packing slip on the outside of the package, just to be safe, I guess.)

Fact: you can’t spell international shipping without customs, duties, and VAT—or maybe you can, we’re not very good at speling. Either way, import fees and inspections are the absolute worst. The ground should open up and swallow every country that requires them. Practically speaking, we do the best we can to enumerate the various fees you’re going to run into if you’re ordering from outside the country in our FAQ. If anyone wants to get their hands dirty, that is an area ripe for disruption.

Customer Service

Get your keyboard shortcuts and canned emails and apps ready cause if you do manage to sell some tees, you’re going to have customers asking you every question in the book. Maybe you tell ‘em to read the FAQ. Maybe you make triple-sure they get their address right before checking out. Things happen, and if you have an ounce of compassion, you’re going to want to make them right.

You could choose to outsource your customer service. I guess that’s a thing people do. We’ve always made customer service part of our identity, so from the beginning—whether it was Jay or Nate or now, the queen of customer service, Sara—we carried that load ourselves. You don’t need to respond within 30 seconds—though of course the sooner the better. You do need to respond at some point though. Being proactive is good. Being honest is better. Let people know what’s happening (and why, if you like). Give discount codes or store credit liberally. Maybe instead of calling it customer service we should call it marketing because that’s what it really is. These people like you enough to give you money. If you make them happy, not only will they probably give you more money in the future, THEY WILL TELL THEIR FRIENDS TO GIVE YOU MONEY. Is that clear?

If you want to get next level with it, your customer service archives are the perfect place to go fishing for product feedback and suggestions for what you could improve. We highly recommend having email conversations with your customers. The more the better, in fact.

Some software: we used to use Zendesk. Today we use Help Scout. We are not going to sugarcoat this: while the interface is thoughtful and well put together, we have real reservations about recommending it. As of today, there’s still no mobile app. Today. 2015. Things are slow more often than we would like for a tool we use all day, every day. You know what else would be great? Twitter support. Much as we would like everyone to just email us, Twitter is the first place people go to ask questions or vent. Zendesk had Twitter support and a native iPhone app when we left it way back in 2013. We wanted something simpler. Help Scout certainly delivers on that front, but you would be wise to conduct your own reviews. Groove is a company that has caught our eye recently, and Respondly is making some moves on the Twitter support front. Customers don’t typically email just because things are swell. Trying to help frustrated customers is a challenge in the best of times. Fighting your customer service app is not going to help. The good news is that customer service software is getting better every day. You almost can’t go wrong… unless you’re still using your personal Gmail address, in which case, what are you waiting for?

Project Management & Communication

Selling thousands of shirts each month is not a one-man/woman job. If you’re fortunate to be in this position, you’ll need some strong team management fu. Finding a style that works for everyone can be a challenge. If you made it this far, though, you’ll figure it out. Here’s some of our favorite project management and communication software:

What did we all do before Slack? Oh, I remember, we used Campfire. Slack is Campfire (or IRC) on steroids. Private DMs, infinite channels, custom emoji, beaucoup integrations, and jaw-dropping ease of use. They still don’t have sound effects which can be a good or bad thing depending on your penchant for dropping “/play live” into your chats. Slack makes it easy, probably too easy, to talk to each other. Now if we could just get external support channels…

Like everyone else, we use Skype for the odd face-to-face chat. As magical as it was once upon a time to be able to talk to people, the mystique has worn thin over the years. With Slack’s Screenhero acquisition it probably won’t be long before it replaces Skype for us too.

On the project management side, we’re big fans of Trello. (Also, Trello, if you’re listening: Taco shirts, pls.) The freemium slope is extremely gentle. You can’t go wrong at least giving it a try. The unstructured nature of the tool makes it a real double-edge sword, but if you learn to wield it, look out. Trello-style Kanban is the spreadsheet of our time.

Taxes & Accounting

Nobody, nobody, nobody wants to think about taxes and accounting—which of course makes it all the more important that someone on your team is. Here’s what we know:

The good news: t-shirts don’t count as sales taxable items in Pennsylvania. The bad news: we’re not accountants. You should talk to some. Online stores like Shopify make it easy to collect taxes upfront for whatever you’re selling. This may go without saying, but it would be smart to look into that before you actually sell people anything. Likewise, if you ever solicit designs and sell them, you’re going to need to collect some tax information from your designers and make sure they get the appropriate paperwork at the end of the year. In the United States, anyone that you pay more than $600 needs a 1099. There are plenty of services online to make this happen—we used Track1099 this year—but again, talk to thy accountant. Speaking of accountants and such, while we have our own bookkeeper, Bench looks intriguing. Definitely something to keep an eye on if you want to keep accounting and bookkeeping separate.

On the accounting side, you’re probably looking at something north of $100 / hour to work with a legitimate company, maybe less in a smaller town or with someone independent, maybe a lot more if you’re in a bigger city. For a single company that keeps good books and handles business in a relatively straightforward way (read: not us), you might be looking at $1,500–$3,000 / year. That might sound like a lot, especially when you’re just getting started, but, well, there be dragons, best to have a seasoned guide around to point you in the right direction. In terms of software, we’re currently using Xero. It’s… fine. The interface is better than Quickbooks Online, but it’s not without quirks. The best advice we can give—and the advice we wish someone would have given us years ago—is don’t overthink this. Ask your accountant what he or she recommends. Even if it’s the desktop version of Quickbooks, you’re better off working with software your accountant understands than something you think is pretty or clever or less expensive.

If you’ve been with us since part two in this series, you’ll remember us teasing what would eventually become Cotton Bureau:

Starting soon, like real soon, we’re going to be launching a store where anyone can pitch us a tee about pretty much anything. If we like it, we’ll put it in the store. Your design gets two weeks to sell 25 or more shirts. If it’s successful, we’ll print and ship it and handle all the customer service as well. Plus we’ll pay you $3 for every sale. Does that sound like something you might be interested in? Email us at us@unitedpixelworkers.com. If you have some artwork you want to include, even better. Making great shirts is a passion of ours and it just so happens that giving our friends and colleagues a helping hand is too. We’re champing at the bit to roll out our new t-shirts-as-a-service offering. If you you’re as eager as we are to see it live, we want to hear from you.

Huh. Would you look at that. We had a feeling you all would enjoy what we were cooking up, and we couldn’t be happier to be where we are today. A lot has changed in two years, but it’s incredibly gratifying to look back and see that the hard work has all paid off. We wish we could share our full to-do list with you. There’s no doubt you would be as excited as we are about all the little (and big) things we have planned for Cotton Bureau. There’s still so much room to improve and so many things yet to learn. We’d love to see better photography on the site. We know that easier returns and exchanges will make everyone happier. More reliable international shipping is a huge priority for us. Better PR, better advertising, improved customer and designer accounts, finding and hiring more smart, talented people… when you find something that you love doing and people love supporting, the list of ways to make it better really is endless. Today, we’re five people with way too much to do. (Speaking of which, we could use some help. If you’re interested in an internship or part-time position, hit us up. We’ve got openings, um, everywhere.) As our business has grown, so has the breadth of what we need to know to pull it all off. It’s probably past time to break these all into smaller pieces. Maybe we’ll do that going forward. For now, we hope this can be a reference for you as you go from selling zero to thousands of whatever it is you choose to sell. Godspeed.

P.S. Have questions? Let us know. We’ll do our best to answer them.

If you enjoyed this post, let us know. We could also use your help spreading the word. Share it, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, join the newsletter, buy a shirt, tell a friend—we can’t do this without you.

Apr 1, 2015 •Permalink

Freshly Laundered 022 / Matt McDaniel

UX Designer Matt McDaniel works and plays in Austin, TX. We spent a little time chatting with him about UX design and the Tron soundtrack. Read on.

CB: Give us the Matt McDaniel backstory - how’d you get interested in being a designer in the first place?

MMcD: Well… I started out with an interest in art and architecture (when I was real young) and eventually found my way to graphic design and then, with everyone else, UX design. Most of my professional design career has been UX and visual design.

T-shirts, though, have honestly always been a passion and soft spot of mine. My main goal with that stuff is to make shirts I want to wear.

CB: What sort of stuff do you design in your day job?

MMcD: In my day job, I’m a UX designer. Some interaction design, some visual design, lots of product design.

CB: Besides making awesome designs for CB, do you have any other side projects you like to work on? What kind of hobbies keep you busy?

MMcD: I’ve been working on a game with a couple friends of mine so I’ve been getting into some sprite animation recently. I’m trying to get more into making some music with some synths but haven’t really sat down with them to do it yet.

I also have a bad habit of saying yes to every shirt that my day job thinks about making… so I do a lot of shirts when I’m not doing CB shirts.

CB: Synths huh? Are you into electronic music mostly? What kind of stuff do you listen to while you work?

MMcD: I wouldn’t say mostly. The genres I listen to are pretty broad but I like to put on stuff like Caspian’s You Are The Conductor, some Tycho or some Caribou (especially that new one, oh man), or the always-good Tron soundtrack.

CB: If you could design album artwork for any band (current or dissolved) who would it be, and why?

MMcD: Tycho, probably. Anybody who can appreciate some nice simple geometry.

CB: Thanks for chatting with us, Matt!

For all things Matt McDaniel, follow him on twitter, instagram, dribbble, or check out his website.