This is an edited cross-post from my new business venture Awesomeosaurus T-shirts.
Awesomeosaur.us was conceived after seeing an advert on the side of a bus stop in the UK. The domain name was available and I’ve been working on building a concept around it ever since. Thankfully, the many installs of Evernote on various laptops and my trusty first-gen iPod Touch allowed me to capture my fevered imaginations of what to do with it.
Over the course of a few weeks I had decided on who was going to print and handle distribution (it certainly wasn’t going to me), a tagline, introduction and a design wireframe. I knew I didn’t want to overwhelm myself, the website or designers with lots of t-shirt designs on offer at the same time, so I went for the idea of offering just one design every 28 days. An exclusive design available for just 28 days before going “extinct”. Plenty of leeway in avoiding designer burn-out too, I thought. Being mindful of how good a t-shirt design may look on different coloured t-shirts I followed Henry Ford’s principle by offering only one colour choice (but alas, not black) to compliment the design (update there are in fact, more colour choices now). The 28-day shelf-life also allowed me to incorporate another, personal, objective into the business – give more to charity. Each design will be dedicated to a particular charity to the tune of 10% of sales. I’ve seen some businesses with little icons donating 1% to a particular charity but I want to do better. Focussing on one design at a time I hope this will mean I send more than a few beans and a cow each month.
It’s taken considerably longer to get the first t-shirt design completed and the product page integrated into the checkout and billing system of the print guys but we now have an outstanding design and the shop is now open!
Awesomeosaurus t-shirts can also be found on Facebook where I’m hoping to build an active community that will show their appreciation of dinosaurs and other awesomeness with Wall posts – entertain us! And of course we all appreciate photos of nicely presented t-shirts in the wild! I’m especially keen to hear what themes fans want our designers to explore and especially what charities we can support as owners of Awesomeosaurus t-shirts.
So, if you’re a t-shirt lover, paleontologist, lost world explorer, prehistoric aficionado or just a good old-fashioned supporter of people getting off their ass (well, metaphorically speaking) for charity then I’d be honoured to count you as a Twitter follower or Facebook Fan. Buying a t-shirt would be awesome of you too.
