So, I had grand plans to unleash this T-shirt design last year but ended up flip-flopping between employment, freelance work and battling some demons…

Let’s just say that this particular project slipped down the list of priorities.

Having recently started a new, part-time contract at The University of Manchester (designing and developing healthcare apps), I was really keen to find something to keep me occupied during my off days without the pressures of client-focused work.

Finally getting this T-shirt out into the world seemed like a good place to start, so I tweaked the original design and submitted it to Cotton Bureau.

At the time of writing this post, the two-week campaign has hit 27 sales with just over 24 hours to go. If you're really quick, you can buy your very own Hypersphere T-shirt here.

The estimated $81 profit from Cotton Bureau sales won’t be sufficient to fund a run of UK-friendly T-shirts as hoped. Instead, I’ll be reinvesting the proceeds into a more affordable, limited edition of screenprints or Risograph prints.

If you like to receive updates when prints become available, please feel free to subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on Twitter or Instagram.

[Update: Monday, 9 April 2018]

Big thanks to everyone who supported the Cotton Bureau campaign!

It reached a grand total of 30 sales and shirts should be winging their way to customers very soon.

UK/EU edition now available via Mercht!

For friends on this side of the Atlantic, I've not forgotten about you. Head over to Mercht where you can get your very own UK/EU edition Hypersphere T-shirt for a limited time.

Cotton Bureau are running their "ALL THE TEES 2017" campaign and have kindly included three of my successful designs from 2016.

These T-shirts are only available for pre-order until Sunday 3rd December 2017 so you'd better be quick!

Buy T-shirts from Cotton Bureau

Followers on Twitter and Instagram will know that I designed a handful of T-shirts last year. Mainly because I didn't stop banging on it about it! Sorry!

Well, I definitely won’t be retiring soon (or probably ever for that matter) but I did manage to sell around 150 T-shirts via Cotton Bureau and Mercht. That earned me around £3 per T-shirt. Not bad, but there is certainly room for improvement.

Both Cotton Bureau and Mercht make it relatively easy to get your designs onto T-shirts and into the hands of customers. You submit a design and they pretty much do the rest. They deal with print, fulfilment and customer services. Obviously, the success of your campaign still depends upon the amount of effort you put into your own marketing (hence those Tweets and Instagram posts I mentioned earlier). Also, they take the lion’s share of the profit, which is totally understandable given that they want to stay in business.

This does mean that the rewards don’t necessarily add up. A conservative estimate of effort per campaign would be around 10 hours including the design and marketing. With sales of 150 units at £3 per unit across 3 successful campaigns, that equates to:

(150 x £3)/30 hours = £15 per hour

That’s double the UK minimum wage but it doesn't take into account the cost of running my business.

I could increase profits by cutting out the middle man and printing T-shirts myself but I'm convinced my wife would divorce me if she came home to find the kitchen converted into a print workshop and stock hanging throughout the house. A more realistic and achievable approach would be to outsource the printing but handle fulfilment and customer services in-house.

So that's my current plan. The first design will be the one at the top of this post (or something close to it). I intend to print this as a limited edition T-shirt and Riso print. I hope to set up pre-orders in the near future and keep the prices between £15-£20 plus shipping.

If you'd like to be kept in the loop, you can subscribe to my newsletter or drop me an email at print@jamesstiff.com.

Just in time for the holiday season, Cotton Bureau are to reprint some of their favourite T-shirts from the archives. I’m honoured that they selected “Hexagon Sun” design.

If you missed out last time, now is your chance!

Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain

That’s really unfortunate for Richard Of York but great news for you if you’re inclined to forget the sequence of colours in a rainbow.

Maybe Richard should console himself with my latest limited edition, screen-printed T-shirt. It’s available for pre-order the next 14 days from Pittsburgh’s finest purveyors of T-shirts, Cotton Bureau.

Pre-order yours now!

Ever found yourself at a loose end with a spare roll of duct tape? That was exactly my predicament recently so I thought I’d have a bash at some lo-fi “tape-ography”.

Sorry about the pun!

Twenty six letters and ten numbers later, I needed a suitable slogan to test the typeface. I settled on an old favourite, “Make Some Noise”. It seemed like the polar opposite of an instruction you might expect to receive if you’re unlucky enough to find yourself restrained with duct tape. This tickled me.

If you are a duct tape aficionado, head on over to Cotton Bureau and bag yourself a limited edition T-shirt. For those who suffer decision paralysis, you only have until 8pm EDT on 2 June 2016.

Order now from Cotton Bureau.

Following the success of an initial print run on Cotton Bureau in the US, my Boards of Canada inspired “Hexagon Sun” T-shirts are now available for a limited time via Mercht, here in the UK.

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My official Boards of Canada T-shirt has seen better days, so I decided to replace it with a BoC-inspired design of my own. I started with the Hexagon Sun theme and just ran with it. My design has just been accepted by the lovely folk at @cottonbureau. Get 'em while they're hot!

A photo posted by James Stiff (@jamesstiff) on Mar 9, 2016 at 3:31pm PST

Order now on Cotton Bureau

Update: Sorry! Cotton Bureau orders are now closed but fear not...

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