Text: UPDATE 4/15/2014: Now designers only need to sell 12 shirts to make it to print. However, you still need to sell 25 shirts to get your share of the profit. Carry on.

Congratulations! Your shirt has been accepted by the highly selective cadre of judges, suits, and censors here at Cotton Bureau Global Headquarters—alright, it's actually just Jay—and your shirt will go live any day now. Now what?

Well, it's time to get selling.

"Selling?" you say, incredulous. "You mean like..." now you're whispering, "'self promotion?'" Yes, in fact. Exactly like self promotion. It has come to our attention that somewhere along the line, "self promotion" became a nasty buzzword, so we're here to put a bullet in that line of thinking once and for all.

Now we know what you're all thinking. "Self-promotion makes me feel icky. Isn't Cotton Bureau big and bad and popular and handsome enough that I don't have to work too hard?" HAHAHA. That's very flattering. And I mean, we're cool and all, and we get our fair share of daily passersby, but we don't have nearly the traffic to sell 25 of your shirt for you. Besides, you don't want to compete with the rest of the designs on the site, do you? Have you seen them? They're pretty good. Nope, it's best to bring your own audience to the party.

The Hard Truth

Let's rip this band-aid off as quickly as we can. If you don't actively try to promote your t-shirt, you will not sell 25 shirts in 2 weeks and your t-shirt will not go to print. (Phew, glad that's over.)

Is it the worst thing in the world if your shirt doesn't go to print? Of course not. The truth is, most shirts don't make it. But look, we're not here just to be some internet gallery of make-believe t-shirts. We're here to put some cotton—and occasionally polyester and/or rayon—on the backs of eager customers. Isn't that what you want? Yes? Good, let's talk about how we accomplish that.

Social Media

You need to tweet. And not those half-assed "oh, I'll just retweet Cotton Bureau" tweets either. No no no...you need a gen-yoo-wine first party tweet. Include a link. Better yet, include a link and a photo. If you're clever, a snappy quip wouldn't hurt. Wait, what's that? You're not on Twitter? [turns to camera, "it's 2014...who's not on Twitter?"] Alright fine, then post it on Facebook so your Aunt Ginny and your best friend from 3rd grade can buy one. Slap a picture on Instagram (even though they don't let you link to anything). Pin it. Svpply it. Dribbble it. Get it out there. And not just once, which brings us to...

Frequency

One tweet on Day 1 and one tweet on Day 14 isn't gonna cut it, especially if you don't have a zillion followers. Your shirt is out there in the sunshine for 14 days; you need to be spreading the word at least every other day. People have short attention spans—even the people who really really care about you and would gladly plunk down upwards of $25 in your name. You need to remind them. And frankly, you need to be borderline shameless about it.

Blogs

You know that old saw about a picture being worth 1,000 words? Well, a post on a popular blog is worth 1,000 tweets. A link from Swiss Miss or Cool Hunting will get you to 25 and beyond. Get a link from Uncrate? Pssh...you can retire. But you don't need to shoot for the moon. Is your shirt about coffee? Try to get featured on a popular coffee blog. Same for bikes, or sports, or, you know, pugs or whatever. Reddit is a great place to find diehards of any topic. Just make sure you're in the right board.

Emails & Texts

Doesn't get more old school than that, unless you have access to a telegraph and/or the Pony Express. But seriously, who's more likely to buy your shirt: some stranger on the internet, or a friend/family member/co-worker who you can make a direct, personal, pleading appeal to? That's what we thought. And look, you probably bought 12 boxes of their daughter's Girl Scout Cookies this year (mmm, Tagalongs). Think of it as reciprocity.

A Little Help From Your Friends

Does your buddy have 10 times as many followers as you do? Is your sister huge on Pinterest? What about your company's email list? Ask if you can borrow their megaphone. You don't have to do this by yourself.

You Had One Job...

OK, maybe two jobs. Let us explain. There's a lot of work that goes into selling a t-shirt online. Coming up with a sweet design, choosing from the near-infinite variety of fabrics and ink types, finding a print shop that's not just two punks in a garage, building a fancy online store, pimping it, making sure you have your artwork, Pantones, and specs in just the right format, driving all the way over for press checks, navigating the horrors of shipping, and patching things up when you sent the wrong size to a customer in Sweden. We're only asking you to do two of those things: designing and promotion.

That's not so hard, is it? Now go make it happen. Good luck!

Want to mock up a t-shirt idea? Need to know which colors we offer? Download our free Cotton Bureau T-Shirt Mockup Template PSD. Here's how it works:

• Download the file and open it up in your favorite Photoshop-like program.
• Open your Layers palette (seems obvious, but hey, you never know).
• Paste your t-shirt design onto a layer above where it says "Your Artwork Goes Here."
• Try out as many t-shirt colors as you like. All solid colors are located in the "100% Cotton" layer group. All tri-blend colors are located in the "Tri-Blend" layer group, and all Poly-Cotton colors are in the "60/40 Poly-Cotton" layer group.
• Once you're happy, save your t-shirt design as a JPG or PNG.
• Submit your design to us right over here.

Happy designing, friends.

P.S. If you want to get more serious, you can buy the very same t-shirt mockup templates we use.)

Look, we know where our bread is buttered. Without designers, there is no Cotton Bureau. With that in mind, we have two very important announcements to make:

1. We can (finally) accept international design submissions.
2. Designer accounts are a real thing.

International

Way back in 2013 we launched Cotton Bureau using Amazon Payments. Every transaction was split at the time of purchase between us and the designer. Amazon would deal with the tax implications and cart experience. It didn't take long for us to get burned badly and repeatedly by that decision. Refunds were a mess, designer account creation was an unmitigated disaster with funds being arbitrarily frozen or designers being prevented from even signing up, international designers were completely out in the cold, and the checkout process for customers was confusing and painful. We used Amazon at the time because we thought it was the only option. Cotton Bureau shares a lot of DNA with Kickstarter and Kickstarter used Amazon. How bad could it be? Very, very bad it turns out.

Thankfully, Stripe was just getting their payments system off the ground and we were able to switch both the checkout and the designer payment system. It was a win across the board. Designer signups were significantly easier, though still not available to our international friends. Checkout was easier for customers and we've had almost zero trouble paying designers. We are now responsible for getting the correct tax documents to people, but we've got that under control. If only we could get international designers on the site somehow. Surely Stripe is working on it, but it could be years before they've developed their payments system across the globe. What to do?

PayPal. Seriously, PayPal. We're familiar with the horror stories. We know first-hand the pain of dealing with their interface and API, yet after searching the Internet up and down, we couldn't find anything better. So here we are. International friends, you can submit designs RIGHT NOW. Send us something. You'll be dropped off in our brand-new account system (more on that below) where you can provide a PayPal address for receiving payment. To be honest, we're still a little bit nervous about using PayPal. Aside from PayPal really being the only game in town, there were two recent events that reassured us about aligning our fortunes with one of the Internet's favorite punching bags. One, our collective anger has gotten through to PayPal. They know they've screwed up and have promised to take steps to make things right. Two, the service has improved since they made that promise. The innards of the site have gotten a fresh coat of paint and, maybe it's just a shared hallucination, but it evens feels a bit faster. We're cautiously optimistic that PayPal has exorcised the spirit of complacence that bedeviled it for the past decade. Finally, while we're using PayPal to pay international designers (or, really, anybody who's not comfortable sharing their bank information for direct payments), we're still not accepting payments via PayPal. That's at least as much a technical decision as a business decision, but the business rationale is that if we do run into any difficulty with PayPal, it won't cripple the site. Outgoing funds may be delayed slightly, but since money only goes into PayPal on an as-needed basis, we'll still have funds available to produce and ship shirts.

Designer Accounts

Until now, the Cotton Bureau submission process was handled entirely by email. The email-only approach was just what we needed to launch Cotton Bureau as quickly as possible. It's flexible, convenient, and requires zero custom development. Now that we've grown up a little, though, it's time to start adding features that are only possible when designers can log in. Is my shirt approved? How can I see all my past shirts at once? What if I want to switch my payout method? How can I edit my shirt description?

Beyond the simple features available to designers today, getting the system up and running lays the groundwork for dozens of features we've been champing at the bit to build since we first dreamed Cotton Bureau up. No promises what's coming or when, but this is a big step on the way to making Cotton Bureau what we know it can be.