I’ve sold designs to Shirt.Woot and the commenters are vicious. Pointlessly, offensively vicious. They’re a tough audience and it seems even the owners have trouble pinning down what the punters want at times. It’s great to see Matt defending his work in their blog. It gets a little bite-y towards the end, but hey, they started it. I love the design, Matt.
43 Comments
derekdeal said 5 months ago
i had a woot shirt a week or so ago that got lambasted in the forums. I admit the design was a total goof, but i still didnt understand that wooters douche-baggedness, until it was explained to me that it was completely normal.
ill have to catch up on the drama tommorrow
RikkiB said 5 months ago
I was warned before my first design went up to expect nasty comments. I didn’t write my arguements back like Matt, but let me assure you that I thought most of them.
jumpy said 5 months ago
Matts designs are awesome,
Woot prints some terrible shite, this isn’t one of them!
heavyprints said 5 months ago
I can’t believe that I just read all of that. That guy is pretty cool, the Turbo kid is a super-douche. Eh. I kind of wish I had that 30 minutes of my life back. lol
I’m glad he stood up for himself, though. Just like I enjoyed when Jimiyo was answering everyone who said things about your shirt Rikki. It’s fun to piss off the regulars. Haha
RikkiB said 5 months ago
Glad that Jimi stands up for me!
hunty said 5 months ago
Community is such a hard thing to control innit?
Unless you can be on there 24/7 to help persuade and direct the conversation it’s just always going to end up being a 'grey area mudfight'.
OR you find somewhere like here which is small enough to only attract decent people!
jimiyo said 5 months ago
i almost want to bust up in there and start laying some law
but i denouced woot a while back
the opening night is over anyways, so that thread will be dead if not already
id like to see an empteer get busted on like that. then we sick the manticores over the lame wooters, there are decent wooters.
corefolio said 5 months ago
are you sure? how soon have you forgotten that 'Adolf Jackson'?
deheh..
jublin said 5 months ago
cool!
sike!
whatever!
seibei said 5 months ago
yeah, some of those kids are ridiculous. I’ve been the side deal on there a couple of times, and there’s a lot of "man, even with the discount, these tees are like $18 - shirt.woot taught me that I should be getting great tees for no more than $10". oh, eat shit already.
hunty said 5 months ago
ha. Good point well made :D
gameyy said 5 months ago
I just got an email from shirt.woot about doing one of these daily shirts... Now I’m nervous. It’s difficult to know whether to design something with broad appeal or go crazy with it and have fun... Hm.
manos said 5 months ago
So much hate for no reason in those posts.
If you are going to say something nasty just shut up. Doesn’t help anyone.
chrisrushing said 5 months ago
Yeah i sent like 3 designs in to him and they were all turned down.
they want quirky/funny shirts.
godmachine said 5 months ago
the money is good though aint it?
godmachine said 5 months ago
But seeing as these nasty silly peoples comments are a bunch of wank- should it ultimately matter? people who will only pay $10 a tee- their opinons dont mean much right? What if I sub’ed a tee and didnt look at the comments?
if a tree slags you off in a forrest and there is no one around to hear it does it still hurt/matter?
godmachine said 5 months ago
booooo booo the dregs! thats well weird innit- you would think that making the print better and thus making more sales would benifit woot then...wouldnt it?
collisiontheory said 5 months ago
Not necessarily, all my woots had no humor at all but did quite ok.
Do your thing man and let them figure it out. My shirts were totally out their style but sold fine. I’m doing a woot in a couple weeks and I have a feeling those douchebags will come out in droves to bust on it. I think woot is fine as long as you don’t let 'em bastards get to you. Pay is good but printing quality is rough.
Sol Amstutz said 5 months ago
I’ve been looking around shirt contests, trying to decide if its worth submitting to. I’ve submitted to threadless before, but i deleted my profile because they print all the same style shit (with a few exceptions). shirt.woot doesn’t look like its worth my time. all the people on there are boneheads, and the prints are shit. i really like DBH because they take it seriously, and its more about the art of the shirt, rather than making some corny ironic tee.
i just feel like there are so many lurkers who just flood these contest sites and are pretentious enough to think that they know everything about art and just shit on everyones designs.
Joe said 5 months ago
Those people piss me off. I don’t know if I’ve done it on your side deals, but I occasionally try to explain why it’s ridiculous for most people to sell shirts for $10. But they pretty much only care about price and often have little to no taste. Ray’s characterization of their comments is right on the money, too. We once submitted a design that they rejected for 'the colors not working'... even though really, they were fine. I don’t know. I’ve seen much more terrible colorways on Shirt.Woot, and the design was absolutely right up their alley. Oh well. They still want something else from us... just don’t know what to give them.
jimiyo said 5 months ago
Ha. That’s quite perceptive. As a former Wooter, I have to say this is quite accurate.
just gotta roll with the punches yo. shirt.woot is a goldmine for the few who dominate over there. weekly chance to win $1000 right? the favored artists, which there are few, win at least twice a month, if not more. with simple art. nothing that would take more than 3-8 hours. as far as dbh, threadless, uneetee, etc... i think contests are worth it... if you are doing it because you like making art. if you are making art to try to win. that sucks.
gabroll said 5 months ago
The less someone pays, the more they want for their peanuts. It’s true of all things. Major retailers are easy to work with. Online sales can be hell.
gameyy said 5 months ago
Interesting. I guess I’ll just do whatever I feel like and not bother looking at the comments at all.
FuzzyInk said 5 months ago
We were just asked to do a shirt of the day design for them as well. My concern is that people from shirt.woot will see the price there and then check out our prices to see that we’re charging $18, having a negative affect on our sales. With the people who have previously sold their designs, did it have an affect on your sales, or did you have an increase due to the spiked traffic?
seibei said 5 months ago
Hey Ray, I’m surprised their print quality is still shit. What a bummer. When they were first starting out, they were on the T-Shirt Forums a good deal asking for printing advice, etc, and all I told them every single time was STOP DOING THE PRINTING YOURSELF. SEND IT TO AN EXPERIENCED PRINTER. Oh well...
Joe, I figured it would be a losing battle to try to explain to them why I can’t charge $10 per shirt.
derekdeal said 5 months ago
heh, my print was spot on, nothing too crazy though
RikkiB said 5 months ago
I have to say that the tees I’ve received from them have been good quality, I don’t want to take out the community-based anger on the owners, I think they’re genuinely trying to do a good thing for artists.
jimiyo said 5 months ago
I think you will do well. Just do your thing. I think theres a very wide demographic there, one of the main ones being parents who buy shirts for their children and females who just like cute shirts.. Not to say that your designs are suited for children, but the market is more palatable for a LintyFresh shirt than say a typical emptees monsterish skirting inappropriate shirt.
.... The print quality is improving. They dont use softner so the ink is pretty thick sometimes on a dark shirt. Base white registration seems off sometimes.
Joe said 5 months ago
I’ve only been a side deal so far, and most of the purchases from that have been our tees priced at $18, plus discounted further with a 15% off coupon code. Even though I think those single-color shirts are in many ways worse than our newer ones... See if you can get a coupon code in the writeup.
mitchbones said 5 months ago
Fuck elitist communites.
RikkiB said 5 months ago
That avatar creeps me out, man :)
heavyprints said 5 months ago
Next time you have a woot shirt I will help Jimiyo defend your honor. It will be epic. I will wear a helmet.
RikkiB said 5 months ago
I may have one soon, but not a doodly one.
Though I’m sure it’ll be a design that their collective 10 year old children could draw, so you’ll be needing that helmet ;)
heavyprints said 5 months ago
Wooo! I gots my helmet ready, and I got a pocket full of snarky!
wotto said 5 months ago
I did a design for woot that got rejected for being too dark which was a disappointment but I intend on giving them something else. Its a shame to hear the print quality aint too good but I think their heart is in the right place.
as for the comments - I never read em.
conor said 5 months ago
same here! I got an email a couple weeks ago to submit tees but I’ve been a bit apprehensive about it after reading the comments on the site. Not to mention my style of tees doesn’t really fit in with their general populace.
RikkiB said 5 months ago
Just do your thing, the owners wouldn’t have approached you if they didn’t like your stuff!
shirtdotwoot said 5 months ago
This is great! I wish we could get this kind of feedback in own forums, but as most of you have pointed out, they’re often times overrun by hordes of blathering loudmouths. Unfortunately, it’s the reality with a community the size of Woot’s. There will always be some percentage of people who think it’s so much more witty or so much more provocative to rail on things they don’t like.
Over the last year, I’ve tried to tune out the noise by reminding myself that even a shirt with 100 negative commentors (far more than the average) is still being bought by an average of 800 wooters day who like the design enough to lay down the money. Most of those folks don’t feel like taking on the 'sux' crowd.
Despite some of the areas we need to improve (and we’re always working on the quality issue) I’m pretty proud of how we’ve been able to represent so many different artists. Over 200 since we started. Besides paying designers something for their work, the other crucial aspect of this project was giving you freelancer/hustlers out there a platform to show off your work. The real success, in my eyes, is getting 150,000 people a day looking at new designers, visiting their blogs, thier stores, sites, etc.
I’ve told some of you before that I wont art direct anyone to death, but I do want you to sell some shirts. Any designer out there considering us should keep in mind, even if we don’t go with your first design (or third...sorry Chris) I approached you because I see something I think we need represented in our community. We’re never going to change everyone’s mind, but I’m trying to keep the faith that the more talented designers we get on board the better it is for everyone.
I’m always available if anyone else has questions/concerns: joel@woot.com (Ray...email me about the quality issues. We want/need to get those worked out).
Thanks
Joel
Director
Shirt.woot.com
collisiontheory said 5 months ago
Hey Joel! Nice to see you here! You should get an avatar by the way. =) You’ll find a lot of talented artists over here.
Quality wise, I think softer inks would be nice. Also, placement and size options would be great. Not sure if your market is ready for that though.
RikkiB said 5 months ago
Welcome to Emptees Joel!
RikkiB said 5 months ago
Congrats to collision theory for the print today!
jimiyo said 5 months ago
YAH! CollisionTheory!!!
Not too much hate going on in there today.
heavyprints said 5 months ago
Cuz AJ is the man. They fear his skillz.