ShirtFight have just posted the winner of their final bout. For those of you who don’t know, ShirtFight is a t-shirt contest site that just appeared a couple of months ago. They held a weekly themed competition and attracted great designers many of whom made designs especially for these contests. They seemed to be doing quite well until a few weeks ago when they announced that they would be increasing the time between contests for financial reasons. They later announced that they would be doing away with the contest altogether. I would guess that sales were not quite as high as they had hoped and these contests were scrapped to stave off financial ruin.
Over at ShirtFight there was a great community and I think they probably put a lot of effort into making their site a success but of course success isn’t easy especially in this industry where hundreds, if not thousands of shops are vying for the same customers and that doesn’t include the POD shopkeepers like me. I often read Jud’s (co-owner of ShirtFight) posts about how he created ShirtFight “to showcase and support really awesome artists and their work” and things like that and in that he has been successful. As I said, he built a cool community and has developed strong relationships with designers. This may also have been ShirtFight’s failing though as he should really have been developing stronger relationships with customers and spending his time marketing his products.
I follow a lot of tee blogs and I didn’t see ShirtFight mentioned often even though they had some very sweet tees designed by popular designers. Of course if, as in my case, they promised to send a tee and didn’t (twice) that might have pissed off the bloggers. We can be a fickle bunch. (I myself have recently been snubbed by Andy at HYA for reasons undetermined.) But hey I’m still posting about ShirtFight regardless. It’s all about the shirt, right?
Another thing I noticed is that even thought they have an affiliate program, apart from an announcement, they seem to be keeping it a secret. Where is the link on their site to the affiliate program? I don’t know. We bloggers like to make some money too even if it is barely enough to pay for hosting. Let’s know about it.
Anyway, perhaps now that ShirtFight’s contest is over it will leave Jud and Miss Ettie time to really market their stuff. They have a good product and a cool new website coming (tomorrow?) so all they need to do is to get the word out. Here is my shout out for them.
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