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Customer designed merchandise

Posted by David Greiner on July 25, 2007 4:42 PM

About six months back we had the idea to put together a couple of t-shirts for Campaign Monitor. The idea was never to make a profit from the exercise, but I wanted a nice way we could say thanks to those customers doing cool things with our software.

This idea is obviously nothing new, but at the same time most software company tees really suck. We've all seen the cheap looking white promo tees with a logo or a bad tagline on the front that you can only get in XL. I wanted something I'd actually be happy to wear down the street. And remember, making a shirt about email marketing that people want to wear is quite the challenge!

We threw a few ideas around the office about what might work, but to be honest struggled to come up with anything that really grabbed us. Not long after I was chatting to the always interesting Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian fame. They've got a range of hilarious shirts and I mentioned how we'd been having problems coming up with ideas. He suggested that instead of trying to come up with an idea ourselves, why not let our customers decide. Why the hell didn't we think of that!

Not long after, we asked our customers to help us come up with some funny t-shirt ideas. We got hundreds of funny (and creepy) suggestions, picked our top ten and then put it to a customer vote. Once the winners were picked, we approached a professional designer to help us go from an idea to a cool looking shirt. I built a quick online store using Shopify, which was honestly one of the best software experiences I've had of late. If you're whipping together any kind of online store, these guys are awesome.

Finally, we found a local printer who could print the designs on high quality slim-fit tees for both guys and gals. Here's the result...

We announced the shirts on our blog a few days back. Within 20 minutes the first order rolled in (Security, sent to David in the UK) and we've been getting plenty of orders from all over the world ever since. The shirts have even been picked up around the web.

Thinking about the process later, I realised the way we created these t-shirts wasn't far off the way we build software. Have an idea, get a prototype in front of customers as early as possible, get their feedback and then iterate and release. Eat your heart out Threadless ;)

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