Why read this? : We share thoughts from our recent first Three-Brains Spreadshirt shop launch. Learn how we came up with our first designs and the technicalities of setting up the shop. Plus, we share what’s coming next. Read this for ideas on what it takes to launch a Spreadshirt shop.
We launched our first online shop for Three-Brains today. That might not sound like big news. But it is for us.
Because we’d to do a whole bunch of things for the Three-Brains Spreadshirt shop to launch
This article will cover what some of those were. So if you’re thinking about setting up an online store, you can follow the steps we took.
To do that, we’ll go back over that opening sentence.
First, the word “first”. Then “online shop”. And finally “launched”.
“First” online shop launch
As one of the “brains”of our Three-Brains deals with e-commerce, we wanted to make sure we had something on our site which puts those skills into practice. Setting up our Three-Brains Spreadshirt shop is only our first entry into selling online as Three-Brains. We believe there’s more D2C experiences we can add in the future.
The set-up and launch of the store followed the principles of our setting up an online store guide. The shop acts as a live working case study for us.
We’ve started with Print On Demand. But as per our how to start selling online guide, there are many more e-Commerce channels including marketplaces, dropshipping and working with online retailers.
All of which we plan to look at in the future.
Print On Demand - fast and cheap
We picked Print on Demand because it’s relatively fast and cheap to start selling online. The infrastructure to sell is set up for you, and you only have to focus on your designs.
We still had to apply many of our marketing and creative skills though.
For example, we did market research to work out who the designs were for. We’d to think about how designs would fit our brand identity. And of course, we’d to use graphic design tools, especially Adobe Illustrator to actually produce the designs.
Online T-shirt Store Concept designs
We had an initial idea generation session around what we could do, and then used secondary research to refine the ideas.
We used Google Trends and Google Ads keywords to see what was popular around the themes we came up with for our designs.
The first concept related to introverts.
We’ve seen a lot of social media coverage on introverts versus extroverts in the past few years.
The secondary research confirmed people still search on introversion. But when we looked at what other T-shirt designs for Introverts were around, some were OK (eg. this INFP T-shirt), but most were a bit lame.
They seemed same-y, and didn’t have the depth of thinking we thought introverts would like.
With Christmas coming up and knowing what an introvert’s ideal Christmas looks like, that’s when our creative thinking kicked in.
We had this idea of an ideal “Christmas Day in the life of an introvert” design. Check out our design notes for more on our thinking.
And of course, where there are introverts, there are also extroverts. So, we also took an ideal Christmas day template, and applied that to how an extrovert might see it.
Christmas movies T-shirt concept
Our second concept is also Christmas related. It touches on the fact people always choose from the same limited selection of movies at Christmas time.
This idea from a creative point of view was much simpler to develop.
The shapes are simpler, there are less items and it’s mainly a text driven design.
We don’t think it looks quite right yet. Maybe there’s too much text? And it’s not easy to read what it actually says on the T-shirt from a distance.
But given we’re just starting out on our T-shirt designs, it doesn’t look too bad.
And it gives us something to work on to see if the idea will appeal to Christmas online shoppers.
Check trademark and copyright
We went through several iterations on the movie design. To be honest, we were worried about risks on copyright and trademarks. We wanted to be sure we weren’t infringing as the last thing we wanted were any legal issues. .
Here’s a few of the articles we read around this topic. It’s important to know what’s legal when it comes to what to design. Nobody wants to get sued.
It was clear we couldn’t use the actual name of any movie. That would clearly be a copyright infringement. So, next, we thought we’d be clever and use some of the dialogue from a movie.
But a bit more research showed this to be a legal grey area. Someone else created the dialogue, so arguably owns the copyright. We decided to go a different way.
Be original and stay safe legally
The safest legal route for this design idea was to create something more original and that was more in the parody area. And also a design which wasn’t specific to a single movie or TV show. Tropes about movie genres aren’t copyright-able, so that’s the route we took.
That led us to create the TV screen. And on the screen, generic descriptions of tropes you find in many movies or TV shows at Christmas.
Not any specific movie or dialogue.
They may suggest a specific movie or TV show to you. But there are many movies or shows they could be. In the same way, we could have chosen “Car Chase” or “Buddy Movie” or “Cartoon Animals” as our choices.
We believe we’ve created something unique in this design with no copyright issues.
“Online shop” - Three-Brains and Spreadshirt
We reviewed the available Print on Demand options, and settled on Spreadshirt as the best place to start our online shop.
The Spreadshirt shop documentation was very clear. They had a lot of positive user reviews.
It seems like they also have facilities in Australia which was a positive for us. (we later found they don’t, but that’s a lesson for another day).
Setting up the account was easy. Once we had our designs, they were quick to upload.
Setting up the design of the shop didn’t have as many options as, say, a Shopify or WooCommerce shop. (See our online store websites guide for more on these). But there was still enough flexibility to be able to customise the look of the store.
It doesn’t quite give us the full website benefits we’d get if we ran the whole thing on our own website. Yes, it connects our target audience, brand identity and customer experience. But using the Spreadshirt platform to do this limits how much control we have.
For something that’s free to use though, we won’t complain too much.
Take care on your colour choices
A couple of learnings for next time is to remember there are a huge amount of colour options for T-shirts in the Spreadshirt shop.
We’d take more care on the colours we use in our designs.
We ended up having 2 different versions of each design. One with light fonts which work better on dark colour T-shirts. And one with dark fonts which work better with light colour T-shirts.
And because we added some reds and greens to add a bit of Christmas flavour, some of the red and green T-shirts didn’t work as the text was illegible.
Spreadshirt does let you choose which colours are available by T-shirt, though we found the system fiddly.
You have to apply the changes by each product and then apply all your changes across the range. We had a couple of times we forgot the second step, and had to re-do all the colour choices.
A few thoughts on the technical side
Embedding the site into our WordPress site took a bit of research to get right.
It recommended we use a WordPress plug-in called WP-Spreadplugin and then API link to Spreadshirt.
We tried this, but eventually worked out to access the API key, you need either an American or European Spreadshirt site.
The Australian Spreadshirt site isn’t set up to handle API links. Mildly annoying.
However, there’s a useful automatically generated Javascript code you can copy from the Spreadshirt shop set-up and paste it into your WordPress page. This was how we eventually got the page to embed.
We found out how to do that by looking at this article called How to Easily Create a T-Shirt Shop in WordPress.
However, not so easy when you realise you can’t paste Javascript code directly into a WordPress page.
You need to be able to add in a custom field. This wasn’t a default on our WordPress site. It wasn’t until we found this wonderful additional article on WP Beginnner under Option 3 using the Code Embed plug-in that we got the link up and running.
“Launched”
We say, launched, but to be honest, the Spreadshirt version of this site we pushed live 2 days ago.
We spent yesterday refining the designs and the look of the Three-Brains Spreadshirt shop launch site.
It was only today we set the link up to the Three-Brains site and we can say the shop is now officially live and ready to sell.
However, we’ve still much to do to actually start selling. Next week for example, we’ll be working on the advertising message for the shop.
Then, we’ll focus on digital media. Setting it up to be searched properly. Some paid search. Some social media posting.
The “launch” of an e-commerce site is only ever the first step in the journey. The Three-Brains Spreadshirt Shop launch was our first step.
Conclusion - Three-Brains Spreadshirt Shop Launch
That’s about all for this week.
We know our shop’s not perfect, but you have to start somewhere. Having an online shop is better than not having an online shop, and though we’ve almost certainly made some marketing mistakes along the way, we know we can only get better.
Watch this space for more updates. Check out the shop and see what you think. Or get in touch, if you’d like some help setting up your own Spreadshirt shop.
Photo credit
Legal scales : Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash
Person typing on a Macbook : Photo by Thomas Lefebvre on Unsplash
Confetti : Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash
