New shirt photos, new shirts and new colors :)

The biggest topic for me today was definitely the improvement in the presentation of our shirts that we announced on Monday: We finally want to present every motif in every available color and in every shape (girlie, hoodie) with a photo.

Well, and while we're at it, we might as well expand the color palette with a few more colors. And why not another color for girlies? Hmm, and hoodies for girlies would be cool too! Wait, wouldn't it be even better if we had a photo of a real person wearing each shirt? Of course, a man and a woman each! That's roughly how the process went for me this week and a medium-sized project turned into a larger and now relatively big project :O

We have a total of around 400 motifs in the store, but around 100 of them sell less than 10 times a year. It's not worth the effort, so they will probably be removed from the store during the campaign. That leaves 300 motifs. If we want to use all the images described above, we will have 15 images per motif, i.e. a total of 4500 (!) images. I quickly realized that this would be far too much work. So we have to program something that automatically copies the designs onto the images! However, the problem is that some of our shirt designs are up to 14 years old and are therefore available in many different formats or sometimes only as very specific vector files for our cutting plotter. I already wrote on Monday that I'm currently looking for a freelancer to help us with the implementation and that's exactly what I want him to do: Take all the existing designs in various formats and convert them into a standardized format that I can then process automatically.

I've now found someone who can do the job, but first I have to get the slightly chaotic print data from us into a format that someone external can understand. I also have to check whether all the fonts are present in order to open the files, and so on. Not really difficult work, but 300 times in a row is pretty annoying. Unfortunately I didn't quite finish it today, but tomorrow is another day :)

Of course we also need a plan for the pictures of real people: we have launched a call for models and will be organizing a photo shoot here in a few weeks' time, where we will take several photos of at least 18 people wearing our shirts. Anyone who would like to take part: You can find the invitation here. However, it only makes sense if you are from Kiel and the surrounding area, which is why I have posted an advertisement for it in the local Kiel Facebook groups. Of course, we also had to organize our photographer, we need professional photo equipment, which we have to rent, etc.

Well, and then we also wanted to expand the available colors and possibly offer hoodies for girlies. We'll be getting some samples in the next few days, but until then I'd be happy to get a rough idea from you about what you'd prefer or whether I've forgotten something that you'd much rather have: