ubux sombrero

A lot of times, folks who have just started into a t-shirt selling venture ask me: "how do I get people to my store to buy my designs?"

9 of out 10 times, they are looking for a very pratical answer:

Does your market listen to punk music? Try advertising in Skratch magazine.

Do you want to get traffic from search engines? Try to follow some basic steps to make your site friendly to both search engines AND people.

My first instinct is to want to tell them something much less pratical, although equally (if not more) important.

To get people to your store -- to get people to buy your designs, you have to have passion.

Tuan from ubux has passion.

I'm talking about a hand written (not typed), 2 page letter that talks about why he designs t-shirts and what his thought process was behind his latest design. I'm not talking about a well typed email. I mean he pulled out a couple of sheets of paper and started writing what was on his mind.

That's the kind of thing that makes people stop and take notice. That type of commitment and drive comes through when you are talking about your designs, when you're building your website, when you're out talking to people in the street.

Now I've never been one for pratical stuff like business plans and mission statements. I have an idea, and I figure out a way to make it happen so I can get the idea out of my head :) I'm learning the pratical side can help though.

One thing that seems to help get you where you want to go is to spell out why you're doing what you're doing. Some call it a mission statement. You could call it a theme or a thesis or a mantra. The point being, write down your purpose. Your reason for making a t-shirt design. Tuan from Ubux has a simple clarity in his mission:

to spread art in an affordable way

That is something I can easily identify with. I'm far from an "artist", but I always liked to think of t-shirts as affordable artwork. Cotton capsules that capture a certain feeling, belief, or moment in time. I like to think that even the Justice Leauge T-Shirt I bought a couple of years back is an original print that may never be recreated again. This is even more true with serigraphed (screen painted) designs like the ubux t-shirts.

All the ubux designs are originally hand drawn by Tuan himself, and later printed on t-shirts in limited runs. The designs are sold mostly through local shops in Montreal, Canada. Now, through the wonders of the internet, regular schmoes like you and me can get these limited edition art prints, screenprinted on supersoft tees (which appear to be Fruit of the Loom).

This particular design, Sombrero, just draws my eye to it each time I'm picking out a t-shirt to wear for the day. Something about the weird little character with the Sombrero that makes me want to wear it and try to come up with an explaination for exactly what it is when people ask me "what's that on your shirt"?

Tuan says the design represnts "a unidentified body coming out of the clouds, and it's surrounded by slides collapsing in the wind. Its composition is triangular. And it's kind of a dreamy theme".

All that sums up the Sombrero desgin nicely, but to me it stands out because it's unique. It's not the same off centered uber fashion designs you'll see on some t-shirt sites and it's not the one liner, funny t-shirts that you'll see crowding the other half of the web. This unique t-shirt art is something you'll only see at ubux (or in a gallery, boutique in Montreal, Quebec Canada).

Getting your t-shirt design(s) in offline, brick and mortar retail shops is not easy. With the originality of the ubux designs and the obvious passion from its owner, I bet it was hard for those boutiques to turn down the opportunity to showcase this new talent.

I've got my limited edition ubux design. Although I have nothing against digitally printed t-shirts (I own quite a few), it's nice to know that when Tuan says this design is a limited edition, he truly means that only a few were printed, and that one day, maybe in a week, or maybe in a couple of years, this piece will truly be a collectors item. Maybe even "vintage" :)

If you like truly limited edition designs and unique artwork, you should definitely pick up a shirt (or two) from ubux. Maybe while you're there you can ask Tuan to print that cool squirrel-with-the-guitar t-shirt. Something about that design is saying "buy me".