Jack Whitehall, stand-up comedian, television presenter and host of Big Brother’s Big Mouth in 2008, was recently spotted wearing a SwishSwosh floral skull limited edition designer T-shirt. He didn’t pay a small fortune for it in the high street – he got it from a website that specialises in producing original T-shirts with designs dreamed up by its dedicated online community of creative designers and ordinary people seeking creative expression.
SwishSwosh interacts across the web with over 50 different social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, in a ‘Spread the Buzz’ campaign to give maximum publicity to contributors once their design goes up. They have a following of 15,000 on Facebook, and with well-known faces like Jack Whitehall endorsing them and interest from the likes of Cheryl Cole they just go from strength to strength. In competition with Threadless at the moment, they appear to have the edge in terms of spreading the word, and they certainly have considerable business acumen, taking full advantage of the latest technology to appeal to the wired generation.
SwishSwosh is also a great place for serious budding designers to flex their creative muscles. The UniversiTee Challenge section is a forum for students to submit their ideas and compete for cash prizes to help with tuition fees and/or drinks and partying. The scheme is overseen by professional designers who can be instrumental in matching graduates to jobs through an annual design competition.
It’s child’s play to download the submission kit, and once you’ve created your design you then get it advertised through the site, and social networks pick up on it instantaneously. Instant fame!
There are competitions galore, where you can scoop up to £700, such as the slogan competition – just sign up, sign in and offload you latest brainwave which might well attract attention from influential quarters.
The funkiness and cheerful layout of the SwishSwosh website make it a really fun place to interact with other budding designers and likeminded folk, whilst at the same time brainstorming for brilliant and original design ideas. Lateral thinking is much to the fore in creative design, and your brilliant insight might come out of the blue. Once you’ve connected to the net, that idea can be translated into a real T-shirt within a short space of time, and might well end up covering the torso of Mr Whitehall at some point.
