Big thanks to Adam from Spreadshirt for hooking me up with a “super limited edition” tee that they’re using to help promote the latest incarnation of their print-on-demand/webshop/marketplace service. I especially liked how there was a beta invitation code printed where the tag is usually printed/sewn in. Admittedly, it isn’t exactly hard to get a beta invitation code, but it was still a very cool touch.

Spreadshirt are probably my favourite of the print-on-demand services, largely because they’re the only company that I’ve actually dealt with on a personal level. I still wear a tee and hoodie that I had made up for my personal blog back in 2005 and I was really impressed by the quality, actually, pretty much everyone in my house at uni had something that we designed together and we really liked the idea of making up tees based upon the meta-jokes that we had going. Of course, with it being a shop that consisted of in-jokes, the only purchasers of our designs were people I lived with, but still I really enjoyed the process (we used to hook my laptop up to the big TV in the lounge and design tees when we should have probably been studying).

Okay, that paragraph was fairly off-topic, but aren’t you glad you know a little bit more about me now?

My initial thoughts on the new beta are that I’m impressed. They’ve freshend up the design, and whilst it does contain a lot of the stereotypical web 2.0 attributes, those attributes look good, everything is very clear, and it just has an overall more ‘human’ feel to it. One feature that I’m really glad they’re introducing is the ability for shop owners to put pictures of their products into their shops. It frustrated me in the past how shops had the standard photoshop style promo pictures even after they’d sold one of that design, because I get the feeling that people are far more likely to buy a tee if they can see what it looks like on a real person. Perhaps with this new feature they will move towards dispelling the myth that print-on-demand services are lacking in terms of quality. Also, the pictures make blog writers more inclined to promote a shirt, I know that Karl from Tcritic has said in the past that a tee would have to be amazing for him to post it if there weren’t any real-life shots available.

I don’t know if the graphics that they have on the front page of the beta were done in-house or if they were outsourced, but I do really like them, its almost a pity that they won’t be in the finished version (as far as I know).

Oh, and the tee is pretty nice too.

Beta.Spreadshirt.net