A few weeks ago we intro’ed a fresh coat of paint on the Cotton Bureau home page. Here’s what you need to know:

Hero Cards

Remember that mangy, old hero area we had? Said something like, “Say hello to Cotton Bureau. The curated, crowd-funded t-shirt community for designers.”

Well, that’s all still true, but it was time for a change. Introducing the new and improved hero area:

For most people arriving at the home page, the hero area is going to be the first place their precious little eyes alight. We happily used it for the last nine months to introduce ourselves and suggest that, if you hadn’t already, you really ought to send us something. (No, seriously, send us something.) Well, we’re all growed up now, and want to use that space to highlight a few of our favorite shirts each week. Is your design a cut above? Is it streets ahead? You might just find yourself featured on the home page.*

*Applies only to large screen home pages. These kinds of shenanigans don’t belong on your mobile device.

Color

With your keen, Holmes-ian sense of observation, you might have additionally noticed: color. The ol’ Cotton Bureau color palette has been quite limited since the launch. With the exception of the t-shirt background grid, it’s been a steady diet of red, slightly different red, a little green, and a lot of neutral. Time to mix it up a bit.

The new (to you, at least) colors take center stage as big blocks in the hero area and major role players in the tagging feature that we’re going to talk about right… now.

Sorting & Tagging

Sorting isn’t a new Cotton Bureau feature, but we did tweak the style to stand up to the chunkier home page layout. (And you might just find a very “colorful” Easter egg if you give it a try.) We also included a view toggle, so you can see our new detail view (more on that below), men's mockup, or women's mockup right on the homepage.

Top, old; bottom, new.

The concept and implementation of tags came out of a desire to de-emphasize the progress meters without losing the benefit of showing which shirts were close to being funded. As long as we were tagging funded shirts, we figured, why not also show which shirts were new, which ones were ending soon, and which ones you could go ahead and order without worrying if it was going to make it.

Having tried a number of styles (hollow? ribbons? monochromatic? icons?), we think the current execution is prett-y nice. We hope they help you out as you work your way around the home page.

Detail View

Possibly the most substantial and eye-catching change of the new home page is the switch from t-shirt mockups to zoomed-in detail views.

Left, old and tired; right, fresh and new.

Showing t-shirt mockups made a lot of sense when Cotton Bureau was brand new. Being explicit at the expense of being convenient is always smart when you’re targeting new users. As we grow, however, the pain of not being able to see some of the more sophisticated designs is frustrating for repeat users of the site. We want to place the emphasis on the artwork, not the silhouette of the shirt.

Coda

Full disclosure: we have no idea if these changes are going to sell more shirts. What we can say is that they feel right, and that we’re going to do our best to learn how to test these changes so we can give everyone the most efficient and enjoyable experience possible.

This is fun, right? We’re learning and hopefully you are too. If you’d like to come along for the ride, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to the blog RSS feed), or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

For too long, we’ve been nameless, faceless bureaucrats. It’s time to say hello to the team.

First up, meet Jay. Jay’s in charge of colors, shapes, and letters. Oh, and if you want to get your shirt onto Cotton Bureau, Jay’s the one you need to convince.

Here’s Nate. Nate is in charge of front-end code, operations, ancient history, rhetoric, and hockey news.

This is Matt, the final member of the website team. He goes by many names: Chamby, The Beef, or when he’s feeling fancy, Le Boeuf.

Last (for now) Sara, our Chief Fulfillment Officer and Customer Service Czar. If you got a problem, yo, Sara’ll solve it.

See? That wasn’t so bad. Now it’s your turn. Tell us who you are and why you love (or hate?) Cotton Bureau. We want to know, promise. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at @cottonbureau or email us right here: us@cottonbureau.com.

If we had it our way, every shirt on Cotton Bureau would make it to print. The reality is, selling 25 shirts in two weeks is a pretty steep climb for most designers, and only about 40% of shirts make it. Though that number is greater than we expected when we launched the site, it's still not good enough. Over the first 10 months of Cotton Bureau, we've seen hundreds of awesome shirts come and go, never making it to reality. We want to change that.

Effective immediately, we're dropping the threshold for success from 25 to 12. That's right, from now on designers only need to sell 12 shirts to get their shirts to print. Pretty sweet, eh? We thought so too. This move means more happy designers, more happy customers, and more green progress meters on our homepage. Win-win-win. In theory, every single shirt on the site should make it to print now...because who can't get a dozen people to buy a shirt?! OK, OK, realistically, we know it'll be more like 70%, but we can dream, can't we?

There is a catch, however (you knew there'd be a catch). If you hit 12 but fall short of 25, you will not receive any profit from your sales. The reason is, compared to 25, the unit cost of producing 12 shirts is crazy expensive, and we need every penny to make it happen in a way that's even remotely profitable for us (after all, we're not some fancy startup with a Scrooge McDuck vault full of investor loot). Ya dig? So if you wanna get paid—and who doesn't?—you still have an incentive to keep pushing past a dozen.

Like everything we do, this is an experiment. It could take us to new heights, or it could totally blow up and send us back to 25. That's the fun/terrifying part. One thing we know for sure is that we've removed virtually every possible barrier for buyers and designers. If you see a shirt you like, you can order it knowing it'll most likely go to print. If you're a designer, you can submit a shirt with confidence.

(Thanks to @pstypelab for the blog post title.)

Last month we updated the Cotton Bureau checkout experience. Here's what you need to know:

Buy Multiple Items

See a shirt you like? Add it to the cart. Notice another shirt you just can’t live without? Put it in the cart too. What’s the big deal, you ask.

Well, pre-ordering shirts from more than one designer is complicated. How (and when) do we charge your card? When do we ship your shirts? What happens if one of the shirts you pre-order doesn’t make it? If you’ve been here from the beginning, you know we chose to punt on those questions originally by designing and building the simplest possible pre-order system that worked: one shirt from one designer.

That may be fine for some people—and may have been necessary for us to launch—but it wasn’t good enough any longer. Customers want to buy more than one incredible design without being penalized by unnecessary shipping costs and inconvenienced by the hassle of checking out multiple times. Finally (at least that’s how it feels to us) that’s possible.

So give it a spin, add a thing to your cart and then another thing. If you find yourself swept up in the euphoria of the moment, wondering why you just ordered  three more black tri-blend tees you were pretty sure you didn’t need and one killer tri-evergreen tee, don’t worry: it happens to the best of us. We’ll be right here when you get back to break down that mesmerizing checkout.

Off-Canvas Cart

Back? Good. What a rush, am I right? Never seen anything like that before? It’s okay. Take a deep breath.

In re-evaluating the checkout experience, we got really excited (as usual) about doing something we’d never seen done before: a completely off-canvas cart experience. Add a product to your cart, have it slide out. Click “Go to Shipping” and it slides out even more*. Whoa. “Review Your Order” reveals a third and final pane in our immersive, rub-your-eyes-to-make-sure-you’re-really-seeing-this, off-canvas checkout triptych. Hit the cart button or anywhere left of the cart (if you can still see the page) to go back and add more tees. What started as a “what if?” scenario turned into one of the best checkout experiences we’ve seen on the Internet.

*On larger screens only; small screens have one slideout pane with the checkout experience showing vertically. (Of course everything is responsive. Come on.)

And we’re not just saying that. Look, here’s what [famous online tech publication] wrot—hmm, mumbling noises from off-stage. Ah, well, it seems our non-existent PR department has failed to feed the tech publication trolls. You’ll just have to take our word for it that it’s the smoothest, illest, most beautimous checkout experience you ever did see, or, better, go buy something already and see for yourself.

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!