PC: Has shirts and other cool merch!

I knew Steve liked Rebubble.

Is the teespring store still live as well then or?

RedBubble is always an excellent choice.

I'd love to see a few more designs in the future, but I like the concept!

Great choice with RedBubble. And neat designs! Looking forward to seeing more.

Same. I'd like more variety in the designs, but so far I like what I see.

The teespring store is still there and active.. we'll be adding the new designs to it as well and then setting campaigns of 1 to 3 weeks as special offers or what ever.

We plan to add user submitted as well as staff created designs as soon as we get them so look forward to that coming up soon.

Thank Achromatic for suggesting RedBubble and Juno for the first design.

Nice to see the clothesline making its way onto PC! I believe it was one of several things I wanted to see before I left staff and suggested when talking about PC expanding as a forum. Some people will like these shirts, no doubt about it. Though I think it would have been a better idea to launch the initiative with a more comprehensive lineup. Your opening week for a store or initiative such as this is likely to be your most important in terms of really letting people know it exists and inspiring interest. With the current selection, it's likely that a lot of users will be a little underwhelmed and won't revisit the thought of purchasing, unfortunately.

What would be more enticing to potential customers would be original illustrations that may also incorporate the logo or have the logo on the back of the shirt (I'm thinking below the neck). I recommend either commissioning some PC artists in tandem with requesting artwork be attributed to some of the clothes in store. It will certainly give the fantastic artists that are on the forum already some extra renown and pride in their work. Not only that but it will show that PC really is community driven, from the intangible code that keeps the amazing user-created styles usable, to the artwork that can be proudly worn on the backs of PC users.

Here's a simple example of what I mean by incorporating PC artist artwork into your clothesline.

Credit to Fairy for the sweet Chimecho artwork!

A little flair and variety will go a long way for the improvement of PC's store. People dig original artwork, the only time they really want branding to be displayed loud and proud is when it's a high street brand, the PC logo in exclusion is a bit less striking. So I really think reaching out and working more closely with the forum's artists would have been a wise thing to do before announcing the store, but there's certainly room to being more proactive in doing so. I'm not sure the sentence added to the end of the thread will have much pull, really.

PC has an awesome artist community just waiting to be showcased; take advantage of that and help them out in return. Get some new designs, fill up your shop, relaunch. From a marketing perspective it'll really benefit you guys in the long run. Best of luck!

I'm all for original designs and art and actually WANT that for the store.. it will be a slow build up from the basic to the best we have to offer.

Now if we can just get our awesome artists onboard (hint) and figure out how to have redbubble print 2 sided shirts and stuff (hoodies, tanks and the like) we'd be good to go.

we could really get PC out there and wear cool designs at the same time.

I did read that you want that, yes. If you read my post you'll see that I commented on that fact. But like I said, launching with a small lineup is strategically detrimental to sales and generating interest in your store. I understand that you wish to build on it, great. But you never try sell a house by just showing its foundations.

Again, like I said in my post, you shouldn't just "hint" at PC's artists to do things. Have an actual structured setup as to how you would go about it, artists aren't going to just guess what you want and how you want it done. Set up specific desires and at least commission some artists, add these designs to the store and THEN launch the store. I spoke about all this in my post so I won't repeat.

Once the store is launched with enough designs that you've commissioned and/or directly worked on with other artists (not subtle hints) then I'd recommend setting up a very clear appeal to artists in Art & Design about submitting pieces to be added to the store.

If you wanted to print on both sides of the shirt I recommend doing some research into what stores do it. Companies like RedBubble do not offer the service due to their Print On Demand policy. It effectively costs companies who do this almost twice as much due to their production lines.

So again, if you want the store to be a success there's a lot more that could be done to make it so. Launching something like this always fails with half measures and your most important sales days are fast passing by.

Bit naive here, but couldn't putting actual pictures of Pokémon on the shirts result in legal issues? ie, us profiting off of Pokémon. Just referring to the specific example you gave there gav

otherwise, to leave some feedback on the idea in general, I agree with gav in principal and agree completely that a lot of opportunity has been missed in this launch. it's certainly salvageable if you guys want it to be and (dunno if this was intentional) the timing of this is really smart - people are being very public about their love for Pokémon right now with all the Pokémon GO stuff going on so these could sell quite well at this point. that makes it all the more imperative that you improve the line very quickly, though - if you just leave it as is you're gonna miss out on a golden opportunity here.

e: one more suggestion - make the text "the pokecommunity" visible on all of the shirts. a massive great logo means nothing if people who are looking at it haven't seen it before and if you want to gain any interest at all in PC from these shirts, people have got to know what they're looking at. it's all well and good that the wearer knows what they're wearing but it needs to mean something to other people too, else you're gaining nothing more than the wearer's payment despite for the first time putting something tangible out into the real world.

sweet, I'll check it out

Razor Leaf said:

Bit naive here, but couldn't putting actual pictures of Pokémon on the shirts result in legal issues? ie, us profiting off of Pokémon. Just referring to the specific example you gave there gav

Click to expand...

Technically PC's existence breaks copyright laws, but it still stands. PokéCommunity has zero rights to sell fan art of characters that are subject to someone else's copyright. This includes Pokémon characters of any description. However the dicey debate of profiteering via fan created artwork has been alive for centuries now in one form or the other.

In saying that, everybody does it and very few really get pulled up on it. It's highly unlikely that the store would gain enough worldwide attention to be of a concern to The Pokémon Company. They (and other large companies) generally only take action if they foresee copyright infringement that profits 0.1% of what The Pokémon Company net per anum.

Copyright is civil by nature, not criminal. The rights holder would have to request a court to enforce the law. So it doesn't matter if you're infringing on copyright if the company chooses not to sue you. All in all however, The Pokémon Company has better things to do than to generate bad press by suing small-time artists or forums.

Whoa, i think the treesprink is the best. What about the redbubble? Ans- ya it is also good

Looks like I'll be be increasing my clothing budget this year! Can you offer hats? I would definitely wear a hat :)