Honestly, you guys should give these away for free. After all, it’s to market your site. I already have 10+ IT shirts from the conference… don’t need another one.
Ahhhh… I see.
But is there another way besides that? I think that’s got to be a large part of the problem.
I always buy that stuff, but I buy it from the thrift store usually on Saturdays when everything is 50% off. .50 tee shirts 1.00 coffee cups. 10 tee shirts $5. good deal I just get the ones with the smallest cool looking logos.
People will buy that stuff but they might wait until it hits the thrift store.
I would never buy a shirt that promoted a website. Kind of lame.
Unless it was your own 
so do i !
i want my shirt will be special
In my many years of dealing with band merchandise it was the t-shirts that always sold the slowest. We could shift 100 odd CD’s in 30 minutes after a gig ended and not even get asked about our shirts, even though they were on display.
But there again our hoodies used to sell like hot cakes even though they were nearly twice the price! the last lot we had (50 of them) sold out in just 3 or 4 gigs.
I think the big problem is that t-shirts are so cheap nowadays so paying top dollar seems pointless, and the fact that nearly everyone has so many t-shirts already, there’s little need to buy more.
Yes, you did something wrong. Can’t find any shirts design, though.
<snip/>
I’m going to take it up with my colleagues, but due to the fact that we aren’t actually making money from the sale of the shirts, it probably doesn’t qualify as good use of front page real estate.
Just to be specific… Hawk was asking about the Forums and not SP (company) in general.
The difference is that they’re a company (like Flippa or 99designs) and have to make money… the forums are run by non-paid staff (chosen by other staff members who were not paid either) and we don’t have to be loyal to anyone or agree with anyone and whatever we do, we do it without asking them. You could say that the staff are completely non-profit
Having said that, I think it is natural that we don’t hate SitePoint (company) and we’re even fond of them… if anything because when we do a contest, or have a project for the community, they support us. Like the forumcast… It is SitePoint (company) who’s paying for the storage. Same with contests: They provide the prizes.
At a glance the code in 99designs looks good to me.
Funny, only thing that makes me nauseous about 99designs is the piss poorly coded inaccessible website with the video on the home page that never finishes loading enough to actually start playing.
If anything it’s just embarrassing for a web development website to be associated with them on those grounds.
Well, for a start, your association with 99designs makes me a little nauseous.
By implication, only a small percentage of designers get paid for their designs - and not that well. Let’s say 1 out of 99. The rest pitch for free, though the client benefits from even the bad designs by seeing a range of designs. (I hope you weren’t expecting any of those who provided designs for free to go on and pay $31 for a winning design.)
You are disappointed in the lack of response to the competition. Maybe you should just keep running them and hope that 1 in 99 times your competition will be successful. That would seem, somehow, fitting.
SitePoint, is probably less well known than PHP, which I wouldn’t wear as no one (especially women) would even know what PHP was.
Haha, and I walk around with Perl shirts : ) It’s okay if people don’t know what the Camel means. Long Live the Camel.
What is the point in wearing clothing that doesn’t cause some kind of interesting connection/channel of communication between two people???
On the other hand, if it piques curiousity, people ask: what is that on your shirt? Like if I had a shirt that said “The Joys of Moose::X” (say it out loud) I totally don’t expect people to know what that means, but I do expect them to either ask or just think I’m ew.
Where are these t-shirts advertised at? If they’re not listed somewhere they can easily be found, the only people buying will be your forum audience. That’s cutting out a significant amount of potential buyers there.
The t-shirts are too expensive for being what they are, free advertising for Sitepoint. You might lower the price a bit, you don’t necessarily need to make $10 from every sale, you will probably make more from the free advertising. 
T-shirt pricing - Men’s Prices
T-Shirt $14.99 - Your Price: 27.99/19.99, markup of $5 - $12
Organic T-Shirt $17.99 - 30.99/20.99, markup of $3 - $13
Also to be quite frank, I don’t much care for the design. You might look at some of the ones posted earlier in this thread, they were nice.
Edit: Just saw this section on that page:
*Apparel only: Price shown is for white garments. Add $3 for light colors, $6 for dark. Our prices include printing on one side—front or back!
My bad, but still, $31 for a t-shirt? Heh.
The question is: why would people buy ?
A LOT websites offer t-shirts of their website or company. Do you buy every fancy t-shirt you see on the internet?
For example, surf to the firefox website, they offer a t-shirt aswel.
Who of you Sitepoint Leaders bought a t-shirt of them? Don’t say you have nothing to do with 'em because I know you all use Firefox sometimes.
You can make other stuff aswel, same as other websites do: coffe mugs, calendars,… of SitePoint. Just DON’T… people are not looking for it. You have to question if there is a demand for coffee mugs first.
See, I already have a coffee mug on my desk. I’m not going to buy a new or second one because a website launched a new mug-product, even if it has a super design, or it’s from my favourite community
In that case, I could buy coffee-mugs from my favourite rock band, my favourite basketball player, my favourite browser,…
Thanks guys, I really appreciate the feedback. This thread has been a bit of an eye-opener for me. It would seem that there are three basic issues that keep coming up. They are completely justifiable reasons not to buy the shirts and I appreciate you taking the time to let me know. I’ll address those three points shortly, but first there is something bigger that I feel I need to confront.
These t-shirts are not a SitePoint product. We are making no money from the sale of them. In fact, the project cost $1k in prize money. We decided that was a good investment if it went some way to creating some energy within our community. It would seem that I didn’t make the purpose of the project clear enough from the start. This was intended to be solely a community building project - there was no ulterior motive.
The three key issues that have been named in this thread are price, advertising and brand placement. The first is easily addressed and unfortunately there isn’t much I can do about it. Because this project has nothing to do with SitePoint (the company) they don’t want to carry stock. Therefore we are using a print-on-demand service which is what dictates the high price. There is no commission on the shirts.
Advertising the shirts is tied up in the same issue. Because these are making no money, I can’t justify asking for a budget for advertising. As a community project, it is my responsibility to make sure you know about them, and somehow it looks like I’m missing the mark. I have used all the social media avenues available to me - Facebook, Twitter, newsletters, blogs, the forums… if anyone has other suggestions then I’m very keen to hear them.
The last point is brand placement. You don’t want to pay money to advertise for us. That is completely fair enough and I concede that it was my oversight not to consider that in the first place. Retrospectively I see that it would have perhaps been more appropriate to specify no branding on the shirt designs.
I think that attitude is indicative of a change in the culture here over the last 6 years. When we last sold a t-shirt, people couldn’t get one on fast enough. They were proud to be part of this community. Now it would seem that you are no longer seeing SitePoint as a community, as Ben pointed out, but as a business. That is a much bigger issue than a failed t-shirt project, so I have started another thread to address it. I’d be really keen to hear your opinions on that as well, while you’re being honest with me.
As Run DMC said
“Calvin Klein’s no friend of mine…
Don’t want nobody’s name on my behind!”
Though it’s funny for me - I object to it on things like the name of the company who made my clothes, but not when it comes to things like band names… I like a band I like to share that. (hence my Motorhead tee collection)… Meanwhile I’ll rip every Nike/Levi/whoever label/tag/logo off anything else.
Not sure where a website would fall on that scale for me.
I’m with the others here.
Firstly, the designs aren’t that much to my liking - they’re fine but certainly not worth paying $30 for when you can get t-shirts from Threadless for $10-20 most the time.
Secondly, as much as I like Sitepoint and use the forums quite a bit - those t-shirts are basically big and unsubtle ads for someone else’s company. I try to avoid buying heavily branded clothes (even by the like of Apple, Nike, Diesel, etc), so maybe I am not your target demographic here - but these are the sort of t-shirts that most companies would give away as easy prizes or throw them in a bonuses with other purchased items. If one arrived on my doorstep for free like this I would have no problem wearing it like any other shirt, but there’s no way I’m paying $30 for the privilege.
The shirts are OK, but not great, and I want great t-shirts, ESPECIALLY if they (ultimately) advertise a company.
“In code we trust” is the better one of the two, IMHO, but is it YOUR code or mine that’s trustworthy?
Personally, I suggest making these freebies instead of standalone products, like “buy a book get a free shirt.”
(BTW I didn’t know about the shirt thing, so I didn’t vote on any designs etc.)
Hope this helps.
designs aren’t really to my liking