Design By Hümans recently held a contest to design a shirt themed around the new Batman movie: The Dark Knight Rises. I was kind of upset when I first heard about this, cause one of the things that really attracts me to DBH is their complete lack of pop culture designs. But when they announced the 3rd place winner today, I was pleasantly surprised. “Arise” by SilentOp incorporates the Batman theme in an awesome way. I may even have to buy this one! Congrats to SilentOp on his third place win in the contest and coincidentally his third print at Design By Hümans. The Top three winners (first and second will be announced on Thursday and Friday) were chosen by Christopher Nolan – Director/Writer/Producer for The Dark Knight Rises and Emma Thomas – Producer.

An inspiring night requires an inspiring shirt design… The theme of this year’s Vinyl Thoughts event was Next Level. A retro video game tribute, so I had to create a shirt using one of my favorite games growing up, the classic Donkey Kong! With the help of Alexa Machine this shirt printing went perfect.

To line up a four color print on the press, you gotta tape one of the films to the pallet in the same spot you want all the prints. So you can line up all the screens in the press to that film, this is the basic registration of the print.

You will be able to see the film thru the negative space of the emulsified screen, and just gotta line them up perfectly and tighten the screws on the press…

Once all four screens are taped off on the back and loaded with the correct ink color, the printing begins!

This four station, six color manual press is perfect for two people to print at once. Just gotta print the colors in the correct order and communicate so no mistakes are made. Check out the final color printing

Then you get perfect prints like this! I wanted to design something with huge letters, so the levels of the Donkey Kong board were a perfect large surface area.

Hot off the press, I picked up the shirts and rushed over to the event where all the shirts sold out that night! I am reprinting some more shirts now, so they will be available on my Sleepy Dan web shop this week.

The two color back design showed off all the sponsors for this year’s event. The show was packed all night and has become such a hit for the up and coming Dallas vinyl arts culture.

I’m so proud to be part of this event and becoming a contributing vinyl designer. If you check out pics of the event and custom vinyls, I created a tribute to Mike Tyson’s Punch Out by creating two vinyl characters Bald Bull and King Hippo!

After I enthused about the type work on one of their tees recently, new British label The Greatest of These have made an exclusive coupon code for HYA readers that will give you 15% off their their whole range. Their tees were £14 and the sweatshirt £20 which was already very reasonable in the UK, but now their prices are even better.

Use the code HYA at the checkout to receive the discount.

Fresh on the heels of the release of Hollow Clothing‘s Winter Range (that I blogged about here), they’ve given HYA readers an exclusive coupon code that will get you 10% off in their store for the next three days. Use the code HYA to receive the discount.

I’m sure that the vast majority of HYA readers will be well aware of Adam, he runs popular indie clothing blog IAMTHETREND and has recently assumed the exciting-sounding position of Special Ops at Storenvy. Surely his greatest position to date though will be coming up over the coming weeks as he becomes a guest blogger on HYA, talking about goings on behind the scenes at Storenvy explaining what life is like at the rapidly moving startup.

I asked Adam a few questions about three things we both enjoy, tees, taking on more tasks than we can handle, and life.

Congratulations on the new job, can you fill in my readers on what your role is at Storenvy?
Thanks a ton Andy! My official title at Storenvy is Storenvy Special Ops, which probably sounds a little more like I will be in charge of kicking doors own and fighting bad guys, but honestly I wear a ton of different hats for Storenvy so putting one job title on it didn’t really work. As of right now I am in charge of our social media platforms, answering customer support, reaching out to our individual stores for feedback/insight, recruiting new stores to join the site, helping manage and grow the Storenvy community, writing for the blog and whatever else we can throw on my plate!

Does this mean we’ll be seeing less content on IATT?
Unfortunately yes. Working for a startup is basically the equivalent of working two or three jobs, so my time has been pretty limited outside of work. That being said IAMTHETREND is my baby which I have raised for over three years now and you won’t see it dying anytime soon. I have had some more guest bloggers pitch in to the site which has been fantastic and I have just had to be a lot more selective with the posts that I make as well as scheduling posts out throughout the week instead of just unleashing them as I write them.

Storenvy seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment, and clearly they’re growing, what do you think sets it apart from other hosted store platforms that explains the growing popularity?
Storenvy has a ton of momentum right now and for good reason. Everyone who uses it, loves it. I’ve been on the phone with dozens of Storenvy users and every single one of them loves how easy is to use the site. And another thing that sets it apart is that it’s the only hosted store platform that also has a marketplace. Marketplaces are huge. It means that you have built-in traffic and shoppers have one destination where they can discover stuff from all the shores in one place. And I can already tell you that the marketplace is what makes the Storenvy community. Our merchants really get a sense that they’re not on their own and can connect with other users. I think the emphasis on community has been a real driving factor of Storenvy’s growth.

I’ve noticed a few articles on the Storenvy blog giving advice to store owners about product photography, can we expect more of this kind of ‘how to’ content?
Of course since I am an avid blogger I wanted to jump right in and start posting lists and resource articles and store interviews trying to gain momentum again for the blog. I really want to turn the blog from an afterthought to a place that people check daily for resources and insight.

Personally, I’ve never really used the ‘social marketplace’ aspect of Storenvy, am I in the minority and what am I missing out on? And will your role involve growing that side of the site?
Storenvy was really designed for 2 purposes — (1.) hosted, customizable online stores (2.) and a big marketplace made up of all the stuff from the stores. It’s totally cool to just head into your favorite stores and check out their stuff without going through the marketplace. Loads of other shoppers come through the marketplace. Each person is different in what their looking for. Some know exactly where to go for what they want and others want to browse a bigger selection. We just don’t think merchants should have to choose between having their own store and being in a marketplace which is why we put the two together.

The Marketplace is honestly a great place to find out about brands and products that you may never have stumbled on before. I highly recommend checking out and browsing the Markets page as you never know what you are going to find around the corner!

How can Storenvy survive without moving to a paid-for or freemium model?
On ramen noodles, tears and hardwork! Ha! But honestly at this moment we have two freemium features on the site, most recently of which we just launched called “Super Discounts”. That extra allows store owners to offer four types of discounts including $-off, %-off, free shipping and ‘buy n get m free’, which is perfect for offering great holiday deals to customers. On Black Friday we saw over 40% of the transactions going through Storenvy including some type of discount with shoppers spending an average of 15% more when they had a discount vs when they did not. Other than that we have a custom url option and also have some other freemium features in mind for the future.

Luckily, we’ve been fortunate enough to pair up with some investors that understand our vision and who have put some substantial financial backing into the business. These are the same guys who have funded other web startups like Twitter, Groupon, Tumblr, and even Google.

A couple of years ago Big Cartel was the de facto choice of platform for creating a quick store, is your job to make Storenvy the first thing that people think of when they want to make a store?
Absolutely! We still feel that there is no one clear choice in people’s minds when it comes to choosing an online storefront. There are some nice platforms out there but everyone is pretty well spread out with no real clear cut winner. Sure sites like Etsy and BigCartel, Shopify have a nice following but there still hasn’t been that household name that has emerged.

How is Pongdeck going?
Ahhhh Pong Deck, what could have been… Lol. Honestly if you were to say a project was to be taking a backseat I would have to say that Pong Deck is riding in the trailer right now. We had some early success with it getting it into Spencer’s gifts for a trial run as well as sponsoring last years World Series of Beer Pong, but unfortunately myself and my partner were not able to truly devote the time that it takes to get a first of it’s kind product off the ground. That being said we haven’t pulled the plug on it, it’s just on cruise control. Speaking of which if you like beer pong or know someone that does we just put them on sale for $5.99 with tees at $13.99 on iwillpongyou.storenvy.com! (shameless self plug).

How’s married life treating you?
I always say to people that ask me how life has been since getting married that it is the same! Which I think is beautiful thing. Really nothing has changed in our lives except we now wear wedding rings and can call each other dorky names like “wifey” and “hubby”. I am truly blessed to have such a supportive and amazing women by my side!

Do you hate getting e-mails that start “Dear Journalist” as much as I do? And do you have any pet peeves when brands send you pitches?
Haha absolutely! Don’t ever send me an email saying “Dear Journalist”. As far as pet peeves go, I really do not have too many. I prefer a short and personal email. Please do not send me a zip file including forty images that is going to take me an hour to open, I am sure they look great but I usually can tell in one or two pictures if I am going to write about the line.

How many tees do you have in your closet?
Great question! Honestly I have no idea, but I can tell you that I have a closet, a few drawers and even some totes full of tees and I still buy tees! I think I have a problem… If I had to absolutely take a guess I’d say 246 and a half.

I notice that you don’t post about daily sites such as TeeFury, why is this? Wary of the here today, gone tomorrow nature of some of the newer sites?
I just have really never been a fan of the tees that are usually on those sites. I would rather post about a brand that is trying to build something over just one t-shirt that is up for 24 hours.

Are you good at switching off from the Internet and unwinding? I feel like I’m constantly tethered to my emails.
I am the absolute worst at this, my iPhone is always in my hand and I am constantly checking emails. I have a very hard time turning it off and just unwinding, I get this overwhelming feeling of guilt like I should be doing some more productive with my time, especially on nights when my wife isn’t home as she bartends three nights a week. I feel like if she is out of the house I need to be working on something.

For any new projects in the pipeline or are you busy enough?
I always have ideas, it’s just the time that is the issue!

Thanks a lot to Adam for answering my not-particularly-exciting questions, but I found that really interesting. There aren’t many people out there that write about t-shirts as much as I do, so to get an insight from a fellow tee blogger is fascinating to me. it also sounds like Adam is in charge of quite a lot at Storenvy, which bodes well for some great posts when he guest blogs here at HYA.

Pukka/Dank have been kind enough to provide HYA readers with an opportunity to pick up their ingenious t-shirt sketchbook for half price. In case you haven’t seen it before, the concept is simple, it’s a sketchbook shaped like a t-shirt so you can quickly sketch shirt designs. I know that you could just draw a shirt shape on a regular piece of paper, but where’s the fun in that?

Usually the price is $15 for a sketchbook, but PUKKA/DANK have been kind enough to offer us a coupon code that will give 50 people 50% off the sketchbook, making it just $7.50. Use the coupon code HIDEYOURARMS to receive the discount, and be quick, because there are only 50 uses on that coupon, once they’ve been used, the deal is gone.

9 Fountains has teamed up with radical design agency Kult and clothing label Sifr to produce a curated line of limited edition, premium graphic t-shirts. Dubbed The K/9/S Collection, this range of t-shirts consists of fifteen designs handpicked from the range of international artwork featured in Kult Magazine’s Animals issue.

Every t-shirt comes with handwritten edition numbers signed by the artist and has a limited run of only 40 per design.

The t-shirts are available from October 1st at 9 Fountains for SGD$79 (about £40 or USD$65). Reserve a tee during the pre-sale period running from September 15th to 30th 2011 and get a 15% discount.

The guys over at Choc Ice were so happy with the post I wrote about them earlier in the month that they’ve created a coupon code just for us that will get you 20% off your order, nice!

Just enter the code HIDEYOURARMS at the checkout to receive the discount at Choc Ice. As far as I know there is no expiry date on the coupon code.

The guys over at Knee Deep in Sleep have been kind enough to offer HYA readers free shipping on any size of order. Here’s the magic coupon code:

HYA-KDIS-FREE

It will be valid from now until Friday night and will give you free shipping (in the UK) on any size of order. I was really impressed by KDIS’ latest collection so definitely head over and check them out in more detail.

Hell yeah indeed. It’s pretty rare that someone will give us a 40% off coupon code, but this is one of those occasions and I’m mighty glad for it. Use the coupon code hidearms to get a whopping 40% off at Summerjunk. I don’t know how long this code will last, so if you want to use it, use it soon just in case.