Posterous

Here at Indigo, the customer services team are often delighted to get testimonials and thank you messages from happy clients via email. The challenge was how could we quickly publish the testimonial to our website, twitter (@indigo) and Facebook (Indigo FB page)? Also, how could the customer services team member do this themself without asking the IT department to do it for them?

Our solution was Posterous – a blogging platform that can auto-post emails sent to it. Now, once someone gets a testimonial they just have to send it on to post@posterous.com and it will publish to our site and wherever else we need it to go! Sweet!

Wishing all our friends, clients and suppliers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We are back at work on 2nd Jan 2009.

…joins us Indigo office, working alongside Roland in the copy and design department. He also runs a company called Healthcare Europa:

Healthcare Europa follows the deals, maps the markets and identifies the opportunities thrown up by reform, technology and consumer demand.

We welcome him and are delighted with all the new faces pitching in at Indigo at the moment. Kate, Flea and Max all within the space of a week!

Annie Vernon, Indigo’s second client, and one time blog contributor, happens to be rowing for the Great Britain team in the upcoming Olympic games in the Women’s Quadruple Sculls. Her crew enter the tournament as reigning World Champions and everyone is hoping they can bring home gold. Indigo Clothing made up this embroidered logo, featuring both the Chinese and Cornish flags, for polo shirts worn by both her supporters and her family.

I am personally delivering the polo shirts (and some cool t-shirts designed by Swedish graphic designer Roland) to the rowing lake. Back in the office on 19th August. The team will be ably lead by Jo Myronidis during by absence as an international courier.

10 brands I am currently evangelising:

1. Indigo Clothing (Our Promotional Clothing Company – UK)
2. Zagat (Food Guide -USA)
3. Weber (Barbecue Manufacturer – USA)
4. Zara (Clothing Retailer – ESP)
5. WeLoveLocal (Local Directory Website – UK)
6. Chateau de Sours (Wine – FRA)
7. Nikon (Camera Manufacturer – JAP)
8. Flickr (Photo Sharing Website – USA)
9. TravelZoo (Travel Deals – USA/EUR)
10. FT.com (Financial News – UK)

Probably says quite a lot about me! What brands to you currently tell all your mates about?

I have 9 lots of £50 Google Adwords vouchers available (you must not be an existing AdWords advertiser). If you want one to help market your t-shirt business please drop me a comment below. First come, first serve, etc.

Starting to get the point of twitter – some good stuff from those I’m following:

CNN Headlines printed on t-shirts on-demand [via tCritic/twitter: karllong]

London bike shop Velorution have Bagaboo messenger bags (photos on Flickr) – designed by messengers, very tough, great colours, in stock from £100 [via Velorution/twitter: _velorution]

Also, via traditional email this time, Howies are offering free t-shirts to customers who spend over £100 at their Carnaby St, London store. Sounds like a cunning way of dumping dead stock – I like it

P.S. Not sure what Twitter is? Common Craft have a great ‘paper’ tutorial for twitter.

P.P.S. Follow us at http://twitter.com/indigo

To carry on the vintage t-shirt theme (see last post about 1976 t-shirt from ISO50) I came across a controversial site the other day called “Stuff White People Like” (SWPL). It has been getting an extraordinary amount of media coverage in the US and it seems the reaction it has generated has been pretty heated considering race is still a massive social hot-potato in a country that had school segregation only 54 years ago. Anyway, it seems this guy has got a book deal out of his blog (see NY Times: Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal).

Trying to steer off from the political aspect of the site (if that is possible), number 86 on the list is t-shirts, and in particular vintage tees. I quote:

The most prized t-shirt category is vintage. As shown earlier, white people need authenticity like they need oxygen and to have an original vintage t-shirt from the 1970s or 1980s is a very powerful social status symbol. The ideal shirt will have a funny logo, a year attached to it, and will be as thin as rice paper. In the event that two white people have shirts that meet this criteria, the superior ranking is given to the person who paid the least for the shirt.

It is certainly worth checking this site out just to see whether all the media hype is fuss over nothing and whether this guy is actually amusing or just a writer getting amazing PR by being purposefully controversial?

A trip to the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens tournament left me reflecting on the state of my wardrobe. Despite being involved in the t-shirt printing industry, it does not mean I come into work every day sporting a Gildan Ultra T-Shirt or whatever is lying around the samples cupboard (though I do confess I am quite partial to the Hummingbird Bakery hoodie I have)!

The forthcoming visit to Hong Kong, a city famed for being full of skyscrapers and affordable tailors, lead me to the Internet to see if I could find any good recommendations as I wasn’t keen on leaving myself to the mercy of the Lonely Planet or a street vendor with a good tip. In the end I came up with the name of Mr. Edward Tam, of E. Italian tailors, as a result of an excellent three part post by blogger Simon Compton.

He was a little tricky to find but remarkably he was only 100m from our hotel in Kowloon, which made going for fittings a piece of cake. By the end of the weekend Mr. Tam produced two suits and 6 tailored shirts (not all for me mind you) and my friend and I, who have bought tailored items before in Chile of all places, were delighted with the results, the quality of the work and the speed in which they were produced.

Hong Kong is a great city, but in you are in the market for an excellent suit, look no further than:

Edward Tam
E. Italian
Shop 117 1F,
Regal Kowloon Hotel
71 Moody Road
Tsimshatsui East,
Kowloon, Hong Kong
Tel (852) 2367 2782

There is a group of people out there who share the collective aim of developing the ‘perfect t-shirt‘. They have now developed a great looking website (luxuryredefined.co.uk) and, being t-shirt related, it sits in my bookmarks in the t-shirt websites category (it is a BIG category!). I do though find it’s presence there a slight irritant and hence the reason for this post. I have to get these feelings of my chest, to explain why that simple link always catches my eye and gnaws at me.

The aim of Better Thinking, the company behind the project, as I understand it, is to develop a t-shirt that is great to wear and is environmentally/socially responsible too. The project started in October 2005 and the t-shirt will be available online and from John Smedley stockists from Spring 2008 in men’s, women’s and children’s versions.

To quote from the press release (PDF):

The Luxury Redefined t-shirt is made in Derbyshire from organic, undyed, unbleached, fair trade, extra-long staple Peruvian cotton with an exceptionally low water footprint. Attention has also been paid to minimising waste, energy and packaging.

Clearly this t-shirt is being pitched at the retail market, rather than the promotional one that Indigo Clothing resides in, and looking at the prices of some of the other John Smedley t-shirts, I don’t expect this to be cheap range! All very commendable and maybe it is too early to comment having yet to see the t-shirt and the price list but I have an issue with yet another company peddling this ’story’ for some of the reasons outlined below:

Are already too many t-shirt manufacturers?

Those of you who are in the promotional clothing industry, I am sure your have bookshelves, drawers and tables full of t-shirt manufacturer catalogues. In fact, I think I think some have escaped the office and invaded my home. They breed like mice! Most of the major UK wholesalers devote a good twenty to thirty pages of their catalogues to t-shirt manufacturers. You have crew-neck, v-neck, slim-cut, 5XL, distressed, vintage, organic, fitted, boat-neck, scoop-neck, beauty-neck; you have t-shirts for dogs, women, children, babies and I am sure if I look hard enough I’ll find a chinchilla t-shirt in there somewhere too. There are American manufacturers, Turkish, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Portuguese, Eastern European, and even British. These companies range from multinational to the humble one-man-band. This does beg the question of whether there is a need for another brand and, moreover, yet another with a ‘green’ angle.

Jumped the shark?

It is so painfully fashionable to set up as an independent organic t-shirt company/brand these days that it is probably passé. I have been an avid follower of trends in the organic cotton arena and have also had strong ethical and socially responsible ideals when it has come to selecting brands to feature on our own site. It has been great to see the introduction of a variety of different kinds of ethical products such as Continental Clothing’s Earth Positive collection in the promo sector, and Nike’s and M&S’s (to name but two) in the retail sphere. Nonetheless, I have also have been critical of the concept of ‘greenwashing‘, and am cynical about the mass adoption of green values for marketing purposes. I am sure that if environmental practices did not bring about saving in energy costs, this current bandwagon would not have grown so quickly. So when I see yet another one of these brands crop up, ready to try and grab a slice of the green pound my first reaction is wariness and not, perhaps as it should be, joyousness.

Is there an appropriate niche?

On the apparel sales front, a truly grim battleground for the hearts and minds of the fickle, and ever more fashion conscious, consumer, as so many companies can attest to, I think that this product will struggle to find a niche in the market place. If it is truly going for the luxury sector as the name implies, I struggle to see how many t-shirts they can retail at a high price without a massive brand like Burberry, Gucci, etc. behind the project. The reasons these marques can sell goods at such a high prices is because they have multi-million pound advertising budgets that elevate the consumers perception of the products worth. However, Luxury Redefined is just retailing a simple cream t-shirt and when people can buy an organic t-shirt from Marks and Spencer for £7.50, and get a choice of colour too, I am intrigued how they are going to fare.

To conclude, it is not in my nature to belittle the efforts of others, to rain on people’s parade or to be overtly negative. I have admiration for anyone that had the guts to step up to the plate and have a go at business for themselves but for a project that has been over two years in development I am concerned about the ‘better thinking’ behind this new launch. It is such a competitive market, which this company is coming into late, without the economies of scale and is attempting to sell to the luxury sector but with an unbranded product where people know they can buy something similar, for less than a tenner, at a good high street store. All that remains for me to say is, good luck.

If choosing screen printing as a customisation option on t-shirts, or other promotional clothing, here are some key money saving tips to keep the price per item down:

1. Print with less colours – a one colour print costs much less than a 4 colour one!
2. Print on just one side rather than both sides.
3. Order more items – in this industry, there are volume based price breaks on both garments and printing.
4. Give yourself time – very rushed orders sometimes incur an ‘express’ surcharge. Give yourself at least 7 days when placing an order.
5. When ordering in bulk (500+ pcs) we can normally do an additional discount on white garments – contact us for more details.
6. Have your artwork in the correct format – otherwise we may have to charge to redraw it.

For embroidery, similar points apply though it is not the number of colours that is the issue but the size of the design as embroidery is charged per 1000 stitches.

It been exactly six months since we moved into our new offices on Provost Street, so I thought it was time for a bit of an update!

As you can see from the photo of the client services area, we have filled the place with a lot of stuff – I think there are desks under the files somewhere! Each desk now has dual screen monitors (19 and 17 inch) to make it easy to cut and paste between emails and order documents, and the Cisco VOIP phones have drastically cut our outgoing phone bills. On the wall is our ‘washing-line’ which has samples of some of our latest print jobs and Opal, Jo, Steph and Lizzie are being cooled by the great Hunter fans we talked about last time.

We have had no major dramas to report, our neighbours, Roome, are lovely and we have tonnes of storage space compared to Bucklersbury House, our previous office. We like going out in nearby Hoxton Square, making Bluu, Cru and the Real Greek our regular haunts for a drink, business lunches or birthday dinner.

A foggy, cold Monday morning in London today and the Waterloo and City line was packed with Gore-Tex ski-jackets. A tourist may have been forgiven for thinking he/she was in Chamonix rather than on a commuter train full of people in the financial services industry!

Today is start of London Fashion Week. Maybe some of the colours on the catwalk this week will filter down into the promotional clothing world in the next few years!

Also today, Matt Attlee, our inhouse web developer leaves Indigo to travel to Japan and Australia. We wish him all the best and we are left to admire his fantastic contribution to the WordPress merchandise store and to Indigo-2’s various clients. Rob Allen from Unearth Travel joins us for a month to lead development on our internal web-application, codenamed ICOMS.

The web team over at Indigo-2 have been giving the Indigo Clothing site a bit of a Spring clean recently. The catalogue design was four years old and whilst it worked and looked nice, I decided it was time that everything was given a facelift. Not all the changes are in place yet, this is a rolling update, but once it is all done I hope you’ll agree that it was a worthwhile improvement! These are the main key changes:

Wider: The site was originally designed for 800 x 600 screen resolutions but with the larger monitor now a common feature across the land we have increased the page width to 979px which works nicely with the larger 1024 x 768 resolution. What this means for you is less page scrolling because we can get more information on each page ‘above-the-fold‘.

Colour Palette: Our colour palette has always been a simple mix of purple, green, grey and white but we have had a close look at all elements on the page and come up with a mix that is fresher and cleaner than before, with more green for emphasis, such as the cool new ‘view’ buttons on the homepage (see above).

Product Catalogue: Now 2008 is here, there are plenty of new products, prices, colours and images available in the promotional clothing market. Everyday we are updating and adding to the catalogue so by the end of the month we’ll have no broken images or other cobwebs.

Quote Calculator: Each product page has always had a screen printing and embroidery quote calculator. These have previously been on separate pages from the product details page but now, using the magic of server-side scripting and AJAX (not a bathroom cleaning product but stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), these will be displayed in full interactive glory on the right of each product. This new feature will be launched next week.

Spring Offers: To celebrate the fact that the days are getting longer and the outside is getting warmer, we have got some great Spring offers to celebrate – check out the homepage for more details.

CityAM, the free London financial newspaper, that is jammed in ones face most mornings by an over-zealous, anoraked vendor at every tube and rail station in this city, has a good article about bespoke suits. I agree with the author that these are special items and once you have had a bespoke suit, going back to off-the-peg is tough!

It made me think though that the same applies to staff uniform. Make sure you don’t just give you staff matching gear (for example, many bar staff wear plain black t-shirts or blouses), make sure it is bespoke to your company, over-branded with screen printing or embroidery to best present your brand or promotion.

Also, if you are interested in bespoke suits, check out our friends at English Cut.