Branching out – Off Track on Mysoti, Rumplo and first shot at Threadless

Not wanting to keep all my eggs in one basket (Redbubble), I’ve been looking at a few other places to get my stuff out there and bet seen by more people.

Mysoti
Mysoti

Mysoti is another Print on demand site that I’m trying out at the moment.  I’ve popped a few of my designs there to see how they go.  The product view’s a little different there as there’s more variations (including kids sizes), but on the face of it they operate the printing in a similar way to Redbubble using Direct to Garment printing.

Rumplo seems to be gaining in popularity as an aggregator of other people’s designs, and I’ve popped ‘Off Track’ up there for people to have a look at.

Threadless
Threadless

I also had a first shot at submission to Threadless (avg score of 1.72 out of 5 – with over 700 scores).  I wasn’t quite prepared for the ruthless voting system!  I’ve since learned this is notorious at Threadless.  It seems the most prolific scorers are also designers who quite readily give out zero <cynic>for sometimes dubious reasons?</cynic>.  Now my submission may not have been good enough – (that’s fine), but scoring zero out of 5?

I think to get something through on Threadless you need to

  • First go through the Critique section and really get to know what does well.
  • Produce something truly original (although I’m not so convinced about that)
  • Fit the style and really study what gets in.

I chose not to do the critique thing, and didn’t study too much on what gets printed – I just took a punt.  Might give it another go sometime.

At least I can use the design again after 90 days (after re-reading the submission t&c) 🙂

Tools to help make life easier on Redbubble for artists

If you’re a RedBubbler (you use redbubble.com) and you have works for sale then you might be interested in the following GreaseMonkey UserScripts I’ve created to make using the site (as a contributor) easier:  All are available on UserScripts.org and can be browsed at my profile.

I’ve written Redbubble Journal entries about each script, which also links to my site for the scripts themselves but I’ve added a brief desription of each below:

Redbubble Work Stats Retriever: (for your own analysis in Excel etc)

This allows you to grab a snapshot of your current stats (as seen in the T-Shirts, Art, Journal, Calendars and Writing pages) direct from your My Bubble page, via a single click of a ‘Retrieve CSV stats’ link.  The stats are output at the bottom of the screen in an Excel-friendly format.

Install the Script: from UserScripts.org, from my site | read the journal entry

Redbubble Stats Scraper: (as above but v1)

This is the little brother of the script above, and works directly on the T-Shirts, Art, Journal, Calendards and Writing pages to show current stats for the items you’re looking at (some people may still prefer this version).

Install the Script: from UserScripts.org, from my site | read the journal entry

Redbubble Link converter: To create links and image tags from any page

This allows you to retrieve Rebubble-friendly link markup for any link or image by simply holding down Ctrl+Shift while you click.  You can then just copy and paste the text straight into a Redbubble description, comment or forum.

Install the Script: from UserScripts.org, from my site | read the journal entry