All designs, slogans and concepts © their respective artists. We'll send the boys round if you're naughty.
Fair & Bare was crafted using Nifty Digits © 2008-2011.
Latest Releases About Us @fairandbare
All designs, slogans and concepts © their respective artists. We'll send the boys round if you're naughty.
Fair & Bare was crafted using Nifty Digits © 2008-2011.
Latest Releases About Us @fairandbare
Fair & Bare has been going for almost 3 years now. We’ve achieved stuff I barely thought possible all through the support of our amazing community. Thanks so much all of you.
This past year, as you may of noticed, has been a little difficult for us. Our main suppliers altered their own brand in such a way as we’re no longer happy about printing on these shirts and we’ve hit problems in finding stock when required for designs. Our commitment to sourcing Fairtrade cotton shirts means we cannot swiftly or even regularly print and all of this has ultimately had an impact on the number of shirts we’re able to print over the past year.
This probably means that you, our community, have been pondering what on earth we’re doing here, given the lack of visible activity. For that I’m sorry and I guess I should have been better at communicating these problems with you.
From next monday is Fairtrade fortnight and we’re planning on holding a challenge to celebrate. We’ve already sourced some wonderful Traidcraft tshirts in black.
Before we do so, I felt like we should make clear to everyone where we are.
My question therefore to everyone is, how would you like us to proceed? What do you want out of us? What features would you like to see on the site? How can we be better?
Some ideas: Do you think we should give up? Should we scrap the ongoing aspect of our competition and just put out challenge calls when we are able to? Should we give the website some updates?
Please feel free to let me know how you feel about what we’ve been doing.
First off, I’d like to apologise for only so far investing in one t-shirt! This will be rectified…
Giving up I hope shouldn’t be an option - what you’re doing is brilliant. I also think the competition aspect is great, as long as you’re still getting enough great quality entries to make it viable of course. It would have been great to have known what was going on - if nothing else we could have been able to encouraging you on, and maybe there could be folks on your mailing list that could suggest alternative suppliers?
Hope that’s helpful, & good luck with this coming year, I hope things will pick up very soon!
Like I said on Emptees, keep Fair & Bare going!
Hey Ian,
Not sure I have anything to add here, but it might be worth us grabbing coffee sometime to discuss our respective business models. Sure there must be potential for us helping each other out. At the very least I’d like to pick your brains about ethical threads. The shirts we use are all Fair Wear certified, but I need to educate myself more on it as it’s such a contentious issue, and we want Dizzyjam.com to be 100% ethical (we’re hoping to power the printing by solar power soon!)
Cheers!
Neil
Hey Ian
I think that you should carry on… Hold regular competitions, send out more regular emails, keep people coming back to the site to vote and submit.
You have my support!
I find this site very interesting, but haven’t so far bought a shirt. I remember looking through the designs after we met at the WordCamp in 2009, and while the available designs are interesting, none really appealed to me (the witch house is the best IMHO, but I doubt many people get it without the ‘title’ of the graphic). So for me, increasing the number of available designs would be a key issue. Maybe there need to be alternative ways to get designs into the shop (maybe even allow people to print their own slogans?!).
The shop itself seems nice to me and the shirt prices especially seem fair, I’ve seen higher prices for fairtrade shirts. I really hope you can keep this project going. Good luck!
Greetings from Germany,
Johannes
Oh yes, another thing… if you are having trouble sourcing fairtrade tees, how about printing on something else… like cloth shopping bags for instance....?
@MazP although we might get enough submissions to run a competition, we’re experiencing supply problems when it comes round to printing.... I’d prefer not to run all the time if we can’t guaruntee we can print regularly. This is why we thought just running challenges may work, if we put out a call once stock has been secured.
@neilraygun - Sounds like a plan
@ammaletu - Bizarre how people find and come to this place! Glad you have though. Allowing people to print their own designs / slogans is definitely something I’ve considered, but we’d have to investigate how we’d go about single prints vs larger print runs for F&B;. I also wonder if it is possible to print using waterbased inks on such a small scale?
@mountain_gnome - There’s certainly scope for some designs on tote bags. I’m not sure how this would stack up in terms of sales vs tees though. Tshirts are somewhat universal.