[Major_Grooves]

I 've finally got round to finishing a t-shirt website!

About the t-shirts: A friend and I just decided that we love the way certain languages sound and in particular, the way the look when written down. I don't mean your common languages... we particularly like the Scandinavian languages. They just look 'cool', even if you don't know what they mean.

So most of the t-shirts are the phrase 'I don't understand' in various Scandinavian languages.

Once we realied we loved the way these languages looked and sounded, we also started looking into phonetics and the name Comprehension Clothing was born. We realised that the phonetic decritpions of words in the dictionary looked quite cool - especially when you put comprehensionclothing together as you will see from the first page of the site.

The shop: Is spreadshirt basic. I haven't made many alterations but welcome any feedback. I'm not sure there's much you can do with it on a basic level, but I haven't even altered the headers and footers yet.

The web design: Well I hardly know anything about web design, so I used the '30 day' free period of a decent WYSIWYG editor, CoffeeCup, which worked okay for me. Now I'm reasonably happy with it the way it is. It's a simple design that looks okay. If need be, I'll pay to buy CoffeeCup to add more stuff (I can edit bugs in the code - it's making things 'appear' in the right place that I can't figure out!).

At the moment I have to animated gifs on the front page that flick through some designs. It's no ideal, but eventually I'd like to use the Spreadshirt Random Product thing once I've figured it out.

I still have to do a couple of minor things, like the error/thanks pages for the contact form, but apart from that it's more or less ready to launch.

In the future we would like to do more phonetic designs. Perhaps bespoke!

Please have a look at the site and let me know what you think (link in sig and above).

In the meantime, here are a couple of pictures of the actual t-shirts as modelled by my mate and shop-partner, Kev:

and

 

[Major_Grooves]

Yeah Solmu, you're pretty much right.

In a sense Kev and I have assumed that because we think it's cool, other people will agree so buy the t-shirts.

In a way it seems counter-intuitive to explain to people why its cool, in order to persuade them to buy the t-shirts - if they think it's cool they'll think so when they see them - not after I've told them why they should think it's cool. We also don't want people leaving because they think it is all non-English!

I kind of like the mystique of it as it is.

However, seeing as we had already considered this being an issue, and it is the first feedback we have had, I will probably try to include some text in there. Problem is - where to put it, and how to do it neatly now that the free trial of CoffeeCup has run-out!

I shall make an attempt over the next week.

 

[Major_Grooves]

Thanks for the comments Solmu and Rodney. To be honest I completely agree with what you say - I was just hoping no-one would say it!

I'm glad you have though. I've made some changes and added some text. I hope that the text explains what the t-shirts are, but allows the visitor to decide if and why they think the t-shirts are cool.

One problem with adding text to the front page is that one of the key things I associate with Scandinavian 'cool' is the very idea of minimalism. But hey if minimalism doesn't sell - what's the use.

Can you please let me know what you think of the text? (I've only added it to the US site so far).

Frankly you've chosen a hard angle to market, but once established I can see how it would market itself (it's the kind of brand that just is cool, so once people know that it would be easier). For now... difficult indeed. Not meaning to be discouraging or anything, that's just my opinion and I do think you're off to a good start.

That's not discouraging, that's exactly what I want to hear.

The idea is, as you say, that it just is cool. We just have to make everyone realise that. I guess a little text will help.

I'm hoping that it would have a similar appeal to the FCUK t-shirts that were very popular in the UK until recently (although I never actually liked them - I was waiting for someone to make a t-shirt in Norwegian!)

 

[Major_Grooves]

Thanks again for the comments. I've reworked the gifs and slowed them down a bit. I can't get them in sync unless I make it one big gif.

I pleased to report that when my shop-partner, Kev, was out in a bar last night, wearing one of the t-shirts, some girls came up to him and asked where he got the t-shirt and said that it was cool.

Now if that's not an encouraging endorsement I don't know what is.

I think I just want to go through the items that we have on the US and UK/EU site and make sure we have a similar range.

There are some annoying differences between EU and US spreadshirt: the US girls choice is rubbish, however our phonetic vector design will fit on US record bags but not EU ones!

I would also like to have a separate shop in € and one in £, but it seems if you have an EU shop you have to choose either or.

 

[Major_Grooves]

Finished off with a header image for in the shop. I'm no great shakes with GIMP, but I think it is reasonable.

Right, now I will go pester another part of site to get tips for marketing.

These t-shirts just are cool...

 

[Major_Grooves]

Are they "cooler" OR are they "more cool." Hmmmm?

Believe it or not I did deliberate for a while between 'cooler' and 'more cool'.

In the end I though 'cooler' sounded better (or more good) and t-shirts sellers aren't known for being sticklers for grammar etc.

Welcome to justthisguy! Glad you like the header!

Time to work on the promotion/marketing.