Collar Free

Designers - we’ve decided to make a major change to the contest schedule.  We are going to stop the monthly contests, and start weekly contests immediately.  We will begin printing one design each week, alternating at first between girls and guys.  We think this is going to provide a number of important benefits.  We are going to be able to produce more designs, and more often.  This should create some better promotion and excitement on the site, as there will be new designs constantly going to print.

We understand there may be some questions on what the new rules are going to be for the weekly contests.  We are working on developing a complete list of these rules, and look forward to sharing more.  I will be posting more on this later in the week, but for now here is where we are at.

We’re still experiencing some voter integrity issues, mostly in the form of users creating multiple accounts under the same IP address, and using those additional accounts to vote continuously on certain deisgns.  We deleted a number of votes before finding the most recent winner.  This process allowed us to come up with 2 new important rules on voting.  I don’t want to share what these are, but they have been implemented, and seem to be working to stop a few loopholes in the manipulation.

The design contest schedule. The new weekly contest schedule will run Tuesday to Monday, and each week the new winner will be announced in the newsletter.  All designs that do not win, but that have a win ratio above 50% will be left in the system for at least one more cycle.

A monthly Jimmy & Pat pick. Jimmy and I have been toying around with the idea of doing a monthly pick based on a tee that we like, but has not yet won in the voting process.  We may start that this month.

Design quality. We are going to become a little more stringent on the designs that we are accepting.  We are still getting a lot of designs that are really just “Clip Art” put on a t-shirt template.  Our mission here is to create a solid fashion brand.  We know that if we accomplish this that we are going to create a lot of opportunity for both you, and us.  It all starts with great design though.  Please take some time and look at some of the designs available in a style guide that we created a while back.

http://picasaweb.google.com/collarfreeinc

Another great place for some design inspiration is to simply check out the designs our competitors are offering.  Please search for some of these companies, or go to their websites for a look.

Thanks everybody.

-Pat