We’ve rolled out another product for your creative enjoyment - now available is fabric yardage.  We’ve added full yards of cotton broadcloth fabric, and it is now available for both you and your customers to create those custom designs!  Continuous yardage will be limited to a maximum of three yards.  There is no limit on the number of yards that can be ordered, however 3 yards is the maximum uncut length .  Be sure to let us know if you have any questions, and happy designing!

Post a Craigslist ad – Craigslist is a thriving community of shoppers, sellers and browsers.  They have sections there for everything from arts and crafts to real-estate, and everything in between.  There are lots of places there where your shop might fit in.  You can post an ad in the arts and crafts for sale section or clothing section, and if you specialize or have certain themes in your shop, you can post in those sections too, for example if you have a lot of vehicle themed themed designs or items in your shop, you can post in the cars & trucks section as well.  Also, don’t overlook the creative services and community sections there as well, there could be a goldmine of prospects just waiting to be found!

Set up a blog - Run, don’t walk over to Wordpress or Blogger and get yourself signed up for one of them there free blogs is you don’t have one already.  Or if you have web hosting, many of them include free blogs with their packages as well.  Point is, blogs are a great networking tool for your business.  Not only can you use it to promote your shop, new items, and announcements, it’s also a great way to interact with customers, general admirers, and other people in business.  Trading links will bring traffic and attention to your blog, which can trickle down to your shop, featuring other blogs and artists can do the same, and commenting on other peoples blogs will get your name out there as well.  Keeping updated can sometimes be a challenge, but if you stick to it you will start to build up a following which will immerse you in the community where your potential customers can be found.  So post, comment, link…. repeat for continued success!

Spread the word – Talk up your shop, no one can emphasize the finer points of your shop better than you can yourself.  You have to take any opportunity to let people know about it that you can.  You may mention it to someone who wouldn’t have a need for your items, but who knows someone who sews all the time, or who collects buttons, or wears nothing but t-shirts.  Get yourself some business cards (Vistaprint is notorious for running free and cheap business card promotions, where you only pay shipping, and there are many others as well).  Give your cards to friends and family who can hand them out, put them on bulletin boards at coffee shops and supermarkets or craft stores, include a link to your store in all electronic signatures for e-mail and forums, order a t-shirt with your biz name on it and wear it everyday (ok, that’s a bit extreme, but wear it sometimes!),  write an e-mail that describes your shop and what products are being offered and include a link to your shop, then send it to 10 of your friends, and ask them to forward it to 5 of their friends.  Word of mouth is the best form of advertising there is. 

Okay, so there’s today’s 3 promotion tips.  Stay tuned for more ideas coming soon!

Okay folks, let’s talk color management and printed images.  I may tend to get a bit long winded, so please bear with me, as we want to  make sure that you get the best results on all of your printed items. 

First off, color management is not a precise science.  The colors that you see on your computer monitor cannot be perfectly reproduced by any printer on the market today due to several reasons

• The human eye can perceive colors in a wider gamut (range)  than a printer can produce, and in fact, the same exact image can look different from person to person, so what you see on screen can appear off from the same image after it’s been printed.
• An image will look different printed on paper than it will printed on canvas, or fabric, or vellum, or vinyl, etc. so there are several variables that will make it look different than what you see on your screen
• An identical image can vary in how it looks on your monitor compared to any other monitor due to differences in resolution settings, calibrations that may have been performed to adjust color, different manufacturers of the monitors, and so on…
• Similar to the above, the same image will look different if it is printed on an Epson printer, than it would printed on a Canon, HP, Roland, or any other due to the variance in inks.
• Images displayed on-screen will usually appear more saturated and bold than they possibly could if they are reproduced by ink on fabric, or paper, etc.

Sooo, now that you know a bit about the “why’s” of printed vs. displayed colors, we need to work on the “how’s”.  How to prepare our image files to get the closest color match we can to our printed items.  That’ll be the topic of our next post on color management.  See ya soon!

Understanding Commissions

In your store dashboard you’ll see a section for commissions which shows a summary of your commission totals.  If you click the link to view commission breakdowns, you’ll see the page below which shows a breakdown of amount held and amount cleared:

This is how it works: amount held is commissions you have earned on orders that have not yet been shipped.  Amount cleared is for items that have been shipped.  Commissions are paid to you based on the shipped status of your orders.  When your orders have shipped you are automatically paid commission based on the shipping method selected by your customer.  Your commissions are released on the expected delivery date.  So if a customer order is shipped via next day air which is a 1 day delivery method, you will receive your commission 1 day after order is shipped.  If your customer selects Priority mail as their shipping method, which is a 2 day shipping method, you will receive your commission 2 days after the order is shipped.  This amount will be under the commissions cleared heading.  The same payment schedule applies to all of the shipping methods.  When viewing an order, the order status box will tell you the date an order ships and the date your commission will clear.

• When creating graphics to upload, remember bigger is better, in terms of size and resolution.  It’s true that the bigger your image, the longer it takes to load, but when you upload a high res image, if your customers resizes it in the designer to make it larger, it still looks great, and there won’t be any quality issues.  PNG files work great.  Minimum dpi for images is 150dpi,  great quality results are usually achieved at 300dpi, and if you create at 600dpi you won’t have  problems if  you decide to use these same graphics on a larger product in the future. 
• Use categories.  Sure, you can put all of your graphics into one folder, but if you spread them out into descriptive categories your customers can find them easily and it won’t take long for all of your thumbnail pics to load
• Remember that when you create a new design you have the choice of allowing customers edit/design with them or not.  If you choose to let the customer edit your designs, they will appear in the designer with all of your other stock designs/graphic elements.

We’re always happy to help with any questions you may have, so if you need more info on graphics, don’t hesitate to comment here or shoot us an e-mail.