Many people ask me if it’s worth the $10.00 a month to get a designer along with other features. Yes it is. The designer allows your customers to interact with the products. This causes them to feel more empowered and makes buying a t-shirt that much more interesting when friends ask them where the shirt is from, they reply “I made it at NekkidTees.com”.

Over the years I keep a close watch on designer made sales vs. pre-made sales. In the end it evens out. One could look at it as 50% increase in sales by having a designer because maybe your customers didn’t find the pre-made colors, location or size of the design you made appealing.

I would recommend you at least try it. If you’re serious about starting a t-shirt shop then this is a very important tool. Hey what’s $10 to give it a try.

Just add the following code to the bottom of your shop.css file located in your Spreadshirt Admin.

#menu {
display:none;
}

Spreadshirt has launched a new feature for users with their Designer Shops. Basically what it does is allows shop keepers to view what custom t-shirt or product was created in the designer and also show what color product, font, font size, wording and design colors. This is a great feature because it allows shop keepers to get a better feel about what is being designed and ordered in their custom designer shops.

Along with this feature 2 more features were also added.

• Shop Partner enables free color selection display in an existing standard shop
• Add option for enabling/disabling text tab in designer shops

Sometime next week Spreadshirt is set to release some new added features for shop keepers to take advantage of. Let’s take a look at what’s reportedly being added as posted by Temple on the Spreadshirt forums.

In Designer Shops:

• More information for Premium partners on sales through their Designer shop, so you can receive a better idea of what customers are creating and ordering through your Designer shops.
• Option to disable/enable the Text tab in Designer shops
• Option to insert an inspiration Bar on either side of your Designer shop, which would show the products you created for your designer shop and the customer can then click the product to load it in the Designer. Some tests of the inspiration bar in shops showed it could increase the conversion rate.

In Classic Shops:

• Option to display the Free color selection for the compact view of the shop. You can choose to display or not display this option. If you display the option,
  then the color squares will appear on the first view of the classic shop.

Out of all of those features the one I am most excited about it the designer shops displaying sale information from user created products.

Here’s another tip this week. I am no expert Illustrator user (that’s not the tip) but for what ever reason I noticed while working on vectors that sometimes trash is left behind in the file. Trash you say? What I mean by trash is un-need outlines from dividing or merging elements. See example:

Every time I create a new design I scan through the layers to make sure there’s no trash as above. Sometimes there are outlines in my design that look like the above, but they are good layers, so I have to be careful about what’s getting deleted as I scan through the layers. Take your time and see what yo find. It might just help get your vectors approved faster.

There are so many times I see people posting that their vectors are getting rejected or are too big for certain products. The solution could be easier than you might think.

99.9% of the designs I make for my Spreadshirt shop are designed on a starting area of 9inch x 9inch in Adobe Illustrator. After much trial and error, Temple from Spreadshirt helped me come up with the 9×9 rule and it hasn’t let me down yet. Will this work for everyone? Probably.

Now I only sell t-shirts for the most part so for those other smaller products such as scarfs, hats, bibs and etc it’s not going to work.  So if you’re having problems designing vectors for most of the t-shirt products at Spreadshirt I recommend you give this a try. Once I have my design ready to go, I stretch it so that it touches the right and left of my 9×9 grid. In some cases the design may be taller and therefore I stretch it flush with the top and bottom.

As many of you Spreadsters out there know that if you have a premium account you get a free custom designer were customers can design their own clothing. I sell about as much if not more through it than I do my pre-made shirts. In this article I’m going to quickly show you how you can:

• Link to a specific product so that it appears when the designer is loaded
• Change the color of products
• Call for a design to be preloaded
• Change the color of the design
• Tell the designer to load a specific category such as baby & family designs

So let’s begin shall we.

Here is a typical link to your designer might look like once you’ve renamed it such as I have.
http://nekkidtness.spreadshirt.com

Here is what the modified link looks like which loads a child’s t-shirt with the baby & family design section.
http://nekkidness.spreadshirt.com/us/US/Shop/Index/Index/productType/442/productColor/1/design/3830646/designColor1/2/department/3/designCategory/1000010/

I know the first thing that came to your mind is “could that link be any longer?” and the answer is yes it can. But for now I’m going to keep it short and down to the basics.

Let’s take the above link apart and see what each part does.

http://nekkidness.spreadshirt.com
This is the basic link I have to my shop. I called it nekkidness by going in to the administrator section of my Spreadshirt account and then clicking Shops and then Linking.

/us/US/Shop/Index/Index/
This is standard and always appears in the linking structure. I’m assuming it changes based on your language or whether you’re at Spreadshirt.com or Spreadshirt.net which is the EU version.

productType/442/
This code defines what product from the huge selection Spreadshirt offers is going to be pulled in to the designer once it loads. It will be the first shirt the customer sees. The number 442 is the actual ID number for the clothing. I’ll explain later on how to retrieve item IDs.

productColor/1/
This defines what the product color is going to be. By default if you leave this field out it will use the first color Spreadshirt has assigned to the clothing. But if you want to change it you can. The number 1 represents the colors that can be used with each produce. To find out the color codes you can visit the apparel page at Spreadshirt.com

design/3830646/
Now if you have a specific design you want to load first, maybe you’re running a new featured shirt or it’s a seasonal design, you can call that design by adding design/yourdesignid. To find you’re design ID simply log in to you’re account, find the design, and it should tell you out beside it.

designColor1/2/
This code determines what color your design is going to be. In the example I am using a white shirt so I wanted the design to be black. In order to do that I added the designColor code followed by a 2 which represents black. I’ll discuss the color ID codes in my next article.

department/3/
Let’s say you wanted to link to the kids section of clothing only, as I have done above, you would do so by this code. In order to find out what ID number represents what section you can go to the Apparel section at Spreadshirt.com and on the left side there is a navigational box, hovering over the links will show you the department IDs. In this case 3 is Kids & Babies.

designCategory/1000010/
Now if you wanted to call forth a specific category of designs such as the Kids & Babies as I have done you just need to know what the category ID is for each section. Thankfully the good people at Spreadshirt such as Temple pointed me in the right direction for this. You have to go to the Spreadshirt site, click on a link such as Men, Women’s, or etc and on the next page you should see a drop down called topics. Under that drop down is a link of categories and when you hover over each one you will see the category codes. To make it easier I will put the list in my next article.

With everything said and done I hope this helps you with your designer linking or at least gives you a better understanding of how the linking functions.

As many of you have noticed I re-launched NekkidTees last month after doing a major back-end system change to manage my shirts. I did this because I wanted to provide more information for search engines. I also wanted to add user photos to each product page, similar shirts, short descriptions and a starting base price.

I plan on adding new categories this week and have been focusing most of my time on creating new t-shirts based off searches customers are using to find my site.

The Kids and Babies sections are still under development.

The NekkidTees logo received a minor makeover as well. I removed the shirt and tightened the the characters up some.

Now only time will tell if all this work was worth it.