[Solmu]

Interesting concept - congratulations on launching.

As you said, there's not a lot to the website, but it is a nice clean and simple look. Better to be minimal but attractive, than... well, not.

Unless you particularly like the mystique of having the site as it is now, you may want to consider including some of the explanation you just wrote for us above. If I was a customer I would look at the site, conclude it was in a language other than English (I'd've guessed Icelandic), and close the site.

If there's a lot of obvious English I'd read that to find out what the concept was about, which may or may not suck me in (in my case, it won't... but better luck finding other customers). I think you're going to have to fight to make the average English speaker realise this site is intended primarily for them.

Factoid of the day: Solmu is actually a Finnish word (it means knot).

 

[Solmu]

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

I'm sure some people will. For one thing we all love Bjork and Sigur Ros (we do all, right? ), so evidently Icelandic belongs in the column of Things Which Are Cool.

In a way it seems counter-intuitive to explain to people why its cool, in order to persuade them to buy the t-shirts

Fair point.

It's tricky. I don't think people can be relied upon to realise it's cool on their own (I may be wrong of course!) often enough to get good sales, but it's possible they can be shown. As you said, it's kind of like explaining a joke though.

Perhaps if you could communicate more what the shirts are (i.e. a series of Scandanavian translations of the phrase "I don't understand"), and leave it up to people to decide what that means to them/why they like it. At the moment people might not even know what they're looking at. Some people will like that and buy it anyway... I guess the question is will more people buy it if it's unexplained (and cool), or explained (and potentially no longer cool).

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.

I think it's even more important with your brand than most to get it seen on the right people (whoever they are for your target demographic), so that is something to consider working on.

 

[Solmu]

The text makes the concept clear with the minimum of wordage.

I agree with Rodney that the rotation is a little fast - it's also a little flickery since the two graphics are out of sync.