From time to time even the best brands have to deal with negative feedback. Some sweep it under the carpet, and some tackle it head on. One San Francisco pizza company has gone further than most though – they are making their employees wear t shirts printed with negative feedback found online.

T Shirts include slogans such as ‘This place sucks’ & ‘The pizza was so greasy. I am assuming this was in part due to the pig fat’

I’m not sure i’d buy a pizza if I walked in and saw the staff proudly sporting that review to be honest, but what a great piece of PR, and a unique approach to reputation management.

Would you consider dealing with your negative feedback this way?

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Producing good printed T-shirts is the responsibility of your printed T-shirt supplier, but they can only work with what you give them.

Finding creativity within your organisation, or working with a designer to create a design are two ways to come up with a logo, slogan or other printable image, but before you make a choice, it’s a good idea to look at printed T-shirts online, or in shops to get some sense of what people are currently choosing to wear – a design may express your concept of your business perfectly but if it looks dated or runs too much against current fashion trends, it may never get worn. If you impose it on staff they may resent it and not like wearing it because it doesn’t look ‘cool’ and that causes demotivation.

If you want to sell your T-shirt or use it for promotional purposes, it’s vital that people want to wear it and be seen in it!

Designers come up with great ideas, but they don’t always match the business profile you want to present: they can be too ‘funky’ if you have a business or too ‘grown-up’ if you have a band you’re trying to promote. Because designers work to a brief, it’s up to you to tell them everything you can about what your design should express, who you want to wear or buy it and where you expect them to wear it.

If it’s a T-shirt for the beach, they can design for that, but if you’re asking for printed clothing that people would wear to a committee meeting, it needs to be a completely different kind of design and it’s your job to lay out the specifications clearly enough so that they can produce the right image for the right people to wear to the right places to achieve your aims.

A logo is an encapsulation of your brand and everything it does, and on printed clothing, your logo has to look good but also to express that brand – something too obscure might look great but convey nothing of your business, while something too straightforward may say everything you want to say, but make for the most boring T-shirt in the world!

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Moving into T-shirt design can be simple if you follow a few rules.

So you want to design a T-shirt?

Before you sail into becoming a T-shirt designer, whether it’s to promote your business, or to start an actual T-shirt line, you have to work out what your primary idea is and whether it will actually sell T-shirts. What is the key element that will make your T-shirts recognisable and sellable, when there already thousands of T-shirts on the market.

Image and slogan

One key feature of a marketable T-shirt is a popular or funny slogan. Alternatively, if you are an artist or designer, you may want to create T-shirts with your own images on the front. If you can’t come up with something original and unusual, it might be time to licensing the rights to use someone else’s work – popular licensed images at present are parkour, surfing and, for some reason, stars and astronomy. Don’t use an image you don’t own, because sooner or later the person who does own the image will catch up with you and you will have to pay them a licensing fee and maybe also a fine.

Choose a T-shirt
Make sure you are using high quality blank T-shirts and offer a variety of colours – it’s vital to make sure that your T-shirts are priced sensibly enough to offer you a profit on the sale of each one, but also that they are of good enough quality to be durable or your customers will not return.

Work with your printer

A T-shirt printer has the skills and capacity to produce fairly short runs so that you don’t have to sink all your capital into producing a lot of T-shirts that might not sell, it’s better to have six designs on offer than just one, because it’s hard to establish yourself in the marketplace if you only have one offering.

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