Advertising

Your Company has its Own Shirts…..You Must be important.

This post isnt necessarily directly related to webmastery, blogging or most of the things I normally post about. That said it is one of my favorite and cheapest ways to get your companies name out there and start a little Word of Mouth going. If you hadn’t figured it out from the title this post is about shirts, custom made ones to be specific.

All you need to turn you and everyone else into a walking billboard is a vector of your logo and a good shirt printer.

Creating the Vector

If you created your logo as a vector than your good to go. If your logo is currently in an image format like .jpg, .gif or similiar format than you’re going to have to convert it into a vector format(the links to a tutorial to convert images to vector). Every printer I’ve dealt with has preffered either .ai or .eps so try to get it in one of those formats. Of course the easiest way to get you a vector is do what I did and post on a large webmaster or artist website like digitalpoint or deviantart saying you’ll give $20 to whomever can create a good logo for my company and specify that it must be in vector format. If you already have a logo image you can pay alot less since it only takes a few minutes for an experienced adobier to convert into a vector.

Picking a Printer

The easiest way possible to get a custom shirt printed is to look in the phonebook and drive to your local custom shirt maker, hand him the file or sometimes just a printout of the graphic and say how many, what color and what quality. Of course alot of printers require a minimum order and for people who only need one or two shirts made at a time ordering a gross(144) just isnt cost effective. Which is where companies like Spreadshirt and ShirtCity come into play. They allow you to print your shirts one at a time(spreadshirt does offer bulk discounts as well.) and even sell your shirts to other people on demand.

I use spreadshirt myself to print Penguin Army swag and all the prints have come out great. They also have a huge inventory of all kinds of products. I just found out about shirtcity recently and have yet to order anything from them but they are a bit easier to get a good graphic since they provide graphic service at no charge, to convert your images into vectors.

Heres the latest Penguin Army T-shirt.
Until now Ive just ordered the logo on white so hopefully olive comes out well.

Tip:If you can afford to definently go with the American Apparel T’s as opposed to the
heavy or lightweight cotton, they are alot softer and nicer.

Also if you are going to print shirts in large quantities to hand out and not sell, spreadshirt,shirt city or any online shirt printer wont be the best option. You should deal directly with the printer. The only printer I know of and have bought shirts from is brunettotshirts and for the quality, his prices are very low.

I hope you found this post useful and please send me your experiences if you used one of the two online ones or went to a local printer. Im also interested in seeing what kind of Swag you created.