They started looking for vinyl banners, but they didn’t expect the multi-hundred dollar price tags they got for professionally produced vinyl banners. They got ahold of us to see if we could help. We set them up with three full color sublimated banners that looked seriously killer. They ordered online and we had the stage banners drop shipped to their next venue, for them to pickup when they arrived. They hung one from each side of the tour PA stacks and hung one up behind their merch booth. It instantly transformed the vibe of their band, they immediately got recognition (12 bands were touring together), people perked up at took notice when they took the stage and they became associated as “One of the headlining acts” of the tour.

People immediately started paying more attention to their merch booth too, which spiked up their tshirt and cd sales, which put more money in the band’s pocket from each gig.

By the end of the letter, the three guys who started out as the unknown underdogs came out on top as one of the centerpieces of the tour, with a new swarm of great fans and bellies full of real food, not gas station sandwiches.

With the myspace discount, the band paid less for all three of our stage banners than for ONE vinyl stage banner, and that wasn’t even FULL COLOR, plus ours are a cloth composite which stores and holds up way better than vinyl, which can crack and wrinkle.

Check them out! You won’t be disappointed.

The team behind ShirtsForBands.com has always been on the cutting edge of digital imaging technologies as they’ve developed over the past decade, but until now there’s never been a reliable, high quality way to reproduce photographic artwork on fabric. That’s all different now, we’ve changed the rules.

Our inks are the ultimate in quality for textile printing, they POP and LAST. We can get brighter yellows, blues and reds than any of our competitors AND we’ll do it for less than they want.

Compare our prices to big name players like cafepress.com and then compare the quality of our TRUE TEXTILE INKS to their low-quality heat transfers (think that wicked Back To The Future tee you had in the 80s) and we blow them out of the water.

Did we mention all our inks and processes are totally eco-friendly? Our production house even RUNS ON WIND POWER and is carbon neutral. Definitely not business as usual.

We’re a small DIY company… a group of friends and fellow musicians, but we’ll put our name up against any of the big brothers out there in the online t shirt world.

Give us a try for your next t-shirt merch order, you won’t be disappointed.

We’ve gotten a couple letters asking us to explain our new pricing now that we’ve GONE FULL COLOR and we’re more than happy to do that. It’s actually much easier now. Since we removed all the scales and breakpoints that were necessary with multi-color screen printing, now we just have two different pricing schedules, one for light garments, one for dark garments.

Light Tshirts:

Dark Tshirts:

Our shirts aren’t low quality heat transfers like some of the higher priced big players like cafepress.com. Our full color printing is done with the highest quality eco-friendly digital printing plastisol inks. Conventional screen printing using the same ink, but our prints are applied by inkjet technology, instead of the regular old squeegee and screen, drastically reducing the amount of ink required.

This keeps your print “light handed” (which means you can’t feel a heavy layer of ink all over the shirt with your hand). Every shirt off our line comes off exactly the same as the first, colors perfect, and they stay that way for years.

Give full color tshirts a try for your next custom tshirt project!

We personally love these tees, and they line our own closets.

Specs:
5 oz., preshrunk certified 100% organic cotton tee. shoulder-to-shoulder tape. seamless collarette. double-needle stitching on sleeves and bottom hem. (white and natural are sewn with cotton thread).

According to the World Wildlife Fund (at panda.org):

“The current production of cotton is not only environmentally unsustainable, it undermines the necessary conditions for future cotton production.”

Because the cotton plant is especially susceptible to insect infestations, conventional cotton production uses large quantities of highly toxic pesticides. Conventionally grown cotton is very pesticide intensive, consuming up to 25% of the world’s pesticides while only taking up 3% of the earth’s farmland. The chemicals used are very toxic, rendering the farmland unusable after several harvests if they are not rotated with alternate crops on a regular basis.

According to HAE NOW, a producer of organic cotton garments:

“A year 2000 USDA study revealed that eighty-four million pounds of pesticides were sprayed on cotton in the U.S.A, ranking it second behind corn. Some of these toxic chemicals include the infamous defoliant Paraquat and insecticides like Parathion which is 60 times more toxic that DDT! In fact, the EPA considers 7 of the top 15 pesticides used on cotton as “likely” or “known” human carcinogens.”

In addition to the environmental benefits of using organic cotton, there are quality implications too. The shirts we chose to use for ShirtsForBands.com clients are a very clean knit garment, they are comfortably tapered, and overall a very high quality product. We’re in love with them, they line our own closets. The knit of the fabric is very tight and nice, and the collars are seamless. Killer tshirts.

I’m wearing one now.

Normally organic tshirts are more costly than regular shirts, but ShirtsForBands.com has changed that equation by removing the unsustainable industry standard Gildan 2000 from its screen printed product offerings and replacing them with Anvil Organic Tees at the same price. Starting at $5! We’re all pretty stoked about it.

Check out the 100% organic cotton tee option under screen printed apparel in our design lab!

Good tshirts define people’s preconceptions of your band too, regardless of what kind of music you play or what kind of gigs you’re trying to get.

Get creative.

We have design tools up to spark your creativity. We have killer artwork, and we loaded it into our designer with the intention of them being design “legos”. Our design tool has the ability to layer artwork on top of artwork, so you can stack design elements on top of each other to make more eye catching designs for your band. That’s the point! Sometimes, merch sells a band more than their music does!

Don’t limit yourself to just a font across a shirt. You’ve got options, use them! While the black tee with white letters will forever be a staple, how many of those shirts can one person own? Generic design has a effect on the onlooker’s eye, kinda like banner ads. They just get overlooked. It has to be something truly unique to grab their attention.

Using more pieces of artwork doesn’t affect the cost of your shirts at all, the only thing that affects price is number of colors. If you use a hundred pieces of art, but they’re all black, it’s the same price as one piece of art.

Making Text Sexy.

You have a lot of options when it comes to fonts, but the possibilities don’t stop there. Our design lab has several special settings you can use to make text more interesting.

Check out the arching tools in the text properties menu. You can shape the path that text curves along by turning on the arch you prefer and modifying its settings. You can also kern letters (change the whitespace between the letters).

Layering Artwork

Look at some of the elements we provide. There are wings and circlets that are supposed to be layered with other pieces. Need a flying skull of death? No problem. As you add new art, they appear as a stack of layers.

Take a wander through our library… we continually add to it, so no matter what your vibe, there will be some artwork to fit it.

When you first add artwork it will default to black, so you will need to change the color of the new art you’ve dropped in.

Keep adding elements until you’ve assembled the design you want, remembering you can move the priority of layers up and down to put them in front of or behind other pieces of art.

Don’t Forget The Back!

With our design lab, you can adjust artwork for multiple print locations, depending on what garment you’re working on designing. For a regular tshirt, you can print on the front or the back (sleeves coming soon). Just swap the location. Your old artwork will be kept intact. Keep in mind, multiple print locations affects price.

Wrap It Up!

When you’re finally satisfied with your design, do a quick review.

Then save your design. This logs your artwork into our database, so you can always get to it, if you need to reorder more merch later. We keep your layouts forever, and you can even add designs that you haven’t even ordered yet, so you can make a few designs and then consult with the other members in your band before deciding which designs to go with.

Ready To Get Started?

ShirtsForBands.com goes a step further, offering specialty fashion (such as Alternative Apparel) and promotional product choices that meet the needs of the musician community more closely than the generic options of competitors. Products such as over-sized full color sublimated stage banners promise great impact on stage at a low price compared to other options for bands, such as vinyl or polymer banners.

“… Our prices are lower, too…” says Desmond, stating that “… we plan to offer $20 off discount coupons to new bands looking to find a supplier that understands what they’re looking for. We’re trying to build relationships with this community, not climb on them and suck every last dollar out of their wallets.”

The ShirtsForBands.com service is currently live with most product options and is scheduled for full launch in early April 2008.

248creative LLC is a media development firm specializing in high-impact event marketing, promotional product marketing, and rich media design. 248creative LLC’s website can be found at www.248creative.com.

Thomas Desmond
Lead Developer
www.shirtsforbands.com
tommy@shirtsforbands.com
248.247.8711

###