The online portfolio of Adam Fletcher an Internet Marketer and EntrepreNerd living in Berlin.
// July 11th, 2008 // Comments // T-shirts
The first time anyones told me they are using one of my flickr pics. Awesome, I’m doing my little bit to support Miss Universe.
Its been a while since an update. Everything’s ticking over just fine at home and work. Today I’m at Barcamp Auckland checking out NZ tech scene. Didn’t manage to think of a talk in time though 
// May 19th, 2008 // Comments // T-shirts
Good news (if you’re my landlord), I now have a new job here in Auckland, my new city (I think HipHipUK is now about two years old which completes the heading). Ironically, I already wrote about what I thought the most important new area of the internet would be – access, in particular mobile (see Web 3.0 post here). Now I have a job working for an Internet company specializing in mobile applications. Is that what they call ‘the law of positive attraction‘? If so then – ‘I think the next big thing is the end of receeding hairlines that you get when you’re only 24′. Lets see how that stab in the dark plays out.
So, desperate pleas aside, the company is called Sprite Mobile. I’ll be their Internet Marketing Specialist. What does that involve? Well similar things to those that I did at Spreadshirt, but working purely with one product. This time the company is just 13 people, not 250. So I’ll get plenty of responsibility as one member of a two person (the other guy has also just been hired and surprisingly is German, because why would I want to work with a different nationality for a change 
marketing team. We’ll be devising a go to market strategy for a new and as yet un-named web portal. I’ve only seen an early demo, and I’ve no idea exactly how many cats I can let leave the safety of the bag, so I’ll say no more. But I think its got plenty of potential, especially in the corporate space which is where I see its key audience being. But I could be wrong, its all up in the air at the moment.
I’m excited because I’ll still get to work with communities and evangelize. I’ll still get to write. I’ll get tons of responsibility. Its not a web 2.0 platform per se. The aim isn’t to flip it to google. We’ll be measured on revenue and not eyeballs. Its a niche area, so will have to be advertised to a niche crowd, which, bottom line means – new skills. Oh and I’ll be able to pay my rent.
As I said before, HipHipUK is now my business blog so they’ll be more posts here about this project, and whatever else is keeping me up at night.
// August 18th, 2006 // Comments // Articles/Features, Spreadshirt, T-shirts, Threadless, Virtual Community
Whats the future of the design contest format? Its a crowded market place these days, one company that I think could make it interesting again is Spreadshirt.
The Draw from spreadshirt looks intruiging and hints at a wider push towards design contests in the future. This is also the first venture I’ve seen under both the spreadshirt and la fraise banners. I thought that spreadshirt might rebrand La Fraise but I think it’s a smart move that they haven’t, after all the have different target markets and La Fraise has a great rep in its market space. I think this design contest (and I dont know how its going to run so I could be way off the mark with this) could be an evolution in the format because of spreadshirts one-off production capabilities. The design contest is an attractive format because:
1. It attracts community by offering involvement and discussion (you know my thoughts on community, if not read the community is king series here)
2. It reduces the risk for the host company, the voting allows you to see the popularity of a product before you’ve gone to the trouble of printed a thousand examples of it that you now have to try and offload. Threadless from years of experience and sales data can probably forecast better than anyone the likely interest in a design and configure production to match. Its a much safer investment to spend thousands of $’s on a run of t-shirts if hundreds of people have said its great.
Spreadshirts model is different, they own now own not only the format in La Fraise but the production as well (in spreadshirt) providing them with profit from producing one-off t-shirts.
Wheres the part where this gets interesting? Now…
Spreadshirts design contests can follow a different format. Take Threadless’ for example – like a design that was submitted? It didnt win? Oh dear, better wait for it to come to Yabbos or something. Â
Spreadshirt on the other hand could build a store around every competition and although there are winning designs and the winner gets the £ and kudos why not offer every design for purchase? Write into the TOCs that every design submitted will be offered for sale (probably after the competition is closed) and that the creator will recieve x £’s per sale. The competition is still an interesting format, everyone that submits a design stand a chance to win but also make some £ in the process even if they dont win.
The only potential problem would be in deciding ownership of the rights to that design with it creator. The Threadless approach might work, by submitting a design you grant us the rights to sell it on La Fraise/Spreadshirt for 90days (with the creator receiving % of sale) after that period you have the right to request the removal of the design, at which time full copyright is returned to the creator.
Oh well I guess we’ll see soon enough…
// July 31st, 2006 // Comments // Articles/Features, T-shirts, Threadless, Virtual Community
I’ve been contacted this week by both Yabbos and Shirtstain who are some of the first (I think GoApe had a couple as well) of stores to feature Threadless designs that didn’t win. The online t-shirt business has gone crazy in the past year and it was only a matter of time before Threadless’ submission rules changed to represent the newly competitive industry they operate in.
// July 29th, 2006 // Comments // Articles/Features, T-shirts
I’ve been thinking about what classes as a blog these days. That term has almost come to mean any site that displays content chronologically and isn’t run for a profit. Unfortunately its also become a pseudonym for other things like sloppy journalism and information aggregation. The first of those two this site is definitely guilty of, its the second that this post is about.
