The world can be a rough place for a t-shirt junkie. While having a vast reserve of these comforting and soothing wearable cotton blankets with pretty and ingenious prints is a must people need to eat too. A steak would be nice every now and then (or whatever the vegetarian's choice might be) but with so many shirts out there it's more like noodles day after day for many of us. This is where we come to the rescue! As you know, there are various ways of getting our own currency, brouzoufs (or "bonjours" as my friends call them), to your user account. The most effective one is to join our affliate program by linking us on your website.
Read more about this from the affliate page, but the idea is actually pretty simple. You puts up links, we gets traffic, peoples buy shirts, you gets 10% of teh sales, everyone can has cheezburgers.
It's working for me, make it work for you too!
Being awake at this hour of the night (I've actually been awake since 3AM) on sunday is ungodly. But hey, I'm doing it for a reason - little after 9AM the whole 96 kilos of me become airborne again as I head down to Berlin. In the land of huge sausages and maids that serve beer 1 litre at a time I will first meet Mike today (we plan to paint graffiti together later today, pics will be posted) and our powerpuff boys from France, Guillaume and Lâm, tomorrow.
My stay will last until next friday and I'm pretty sure it'll be an adventure even if most of the time will be spent sitting in our office. I already screwed up booking the hotel (even if Guillaume kindly served me the info on a plate) because I was ever so busy and simply forgot about the whole thing. On friday it became painfully obvious to me that even though Berlin is a huge city for a small town guy like myself the hotel capacity doesn't quite meet with the size of it. Well, now I've booked myself a room in a hostel for the first two nights and the damn thing looks like something that has been lost in time since the 60's - they actually have a "YELLOW SUBMARINE LOUNGE."
I survived Paris without anything else than a "merci beaucoup" and a retarted smile on my face but the trouble with Berlin is that I don't really know how to say "thank you very much" in german. I only know words like "leatherpants" ("lederhosen"), "a tank" ("panzerwagen" - this is my absolute favourite because it sounds very manly) and "faster, faster" ("schnell, schnell"). The way I'm thinking it's not probably a good idea to upset the locals with those. While Mike is really friendly and mellow guy by all means I'm not quite sure Dieter, Franz, Jürgen and Karl-Heinz are. ^_^
To make sure you have a nice selection of shirts to choose from we decided to release yet another shirt. "Pi(s)" is our newest one - 500 of these beauties available in silver. The design is Laurent, thanks!
"Pi(s)" in our store
We also know that if there's anything our community loves more than the laFraise shirts it's getting a nice discount on them. As you've propably noticed we have a pretty large stock of shirts at the moment and that gives you a nice chance to purchace some of the recently released ones for 11€. Check out pages 3 & 4 in our store - even the Barbapapa shirts (which I feel we just released) are included in the offer!
A friday game with this same idea has actually been used a couple of times before but I do love music and I do love trivia. So, download an mp3-file from here. It contains 10 clips and your job is to name the artists and the tunes.
List them like this:
1. Artist - Song
…
10. Artist - Song
The first user to get all 10 of them right wins enough brouzoufs for a t-shirt or his / her choice from our selection (shipping included). The game shouldn't be too tough but if nobody gets all 10 of them the user with the biggest number of correct answers by midnight (GMT) tonight will be announced the winner. Have fun. :)
…will be here in a few minutes. I'm currently exporting the audio file for it and that takes a little while.
In the meantime: I know many of the winners of the friday games haven't had their brouzoufs yet. I'm extremely sorry about that - things have been really hectic lately here at laFraise and I delivered the list of the winners late to Camille. Now she's been way too busy to do the transfers. I hope you accept my apologies and I promise you the brouzoufs are on their way. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
This week is just packed with the nicest shirts. After the triple release we’re now doing a double!
Let’s start with “You Rock.” A HUGE print with lovely halftones leaves me in total awe. This is exactly the direction where I think laFraise should be heading more and more – high up in the air with trendsetting design work from the 21st century. It’s not us that rock but you, Cuypi!
The second shirt we’ve got today isn’t a bit worse than the first one. Theoze has definitely gone the extra mile with showing us that using 4 colors isn’t really a limitation if you decide not to treat it as such. You can achieve pretty much all the colors of the rainbow with them if you know what you’re doing and “Colorz make me happy” certainly illustrates that like never before.
Dudes, keep up the good work. I think I just fell in love with these!
"You rock" in our store
"Colorz make me happy" in our store
Besides the three new shirts I think it’s about time to announce a couple of new winners too. The frenchies do that all the time but guess what? We’ve got two new EU-winners today – one from the “US Politics” theme competition and one from the classics section.
Let’s start with the “US Politics” one. All in all I think the theme competition went quite well. Just like we guessed in advance the designers mostly focused on the foreign politics even if we kinda tried to avoid that a bit. Even so I didn’t feel comfortable guiding the competition too much into any certain direction – I think that setting up restrictions will also restrict the creativity of our designer members.
After loads of nice designs one of them came on top and the winner is… *drumroll* Conker! Two of his designs actually made it to top three and “U.Scream” had the most preorders. Guess what? We’re going to print this design in a very special way…
The other winning design for the day is Leadfoot’s “Descendant.” The joke is pretty sophisticated and style is just lovely. If I’ve understood correctly Leadfoot is kind of a legend on another t-shirt design competition. True or not, we’re delighted to have him here! He says on his profile that someday he'll take his wife to Paris. Well, this just made him 1000€ for the plane tickets.
Congratulations to both winners. Let’s pop a bottle of sparkling wine, huh?
We haven’t really made a triple release in a long while so we might as well do one today to satisfy your needs for t-shirts. We know you’re a hungry bunch and having said that I think I’ll start introducing the new shirts with Adriserralta’s “Panther” – it features a big cat that looks pretty hungry too. Closer is necessary though. In the end it’s just a bunch of cute little ants fooling around.
The second new shirt we have for you is Filak’s “Bomber Love” with a nice retro touch.
…and last but definitely not least we’ve got the first “customers’ choice” reprint – Legojeff’s “Fugu” is here! 500 shirts featuring the deadly but oh so very cute fish-design coming your way.
"Panther" in our store
"Bomber Love" in our store
"Fugu" in our store
Our german blogger Mike has been working with the Vice Magazine for a few months now and we have the first winner for the theme competition they’ve been running on the german site. “Friendly Balloon” by Sharmila also features a custom neckprint just like the re-edited classics we’ve made during the last few months. It’ll be interesting to see how the production places this one on a shirt – the design leaves quite a few options for doing that.
Looking my own people, the finns, from the outside (I try to place myself into a position where I can observe our customs as a foreigner) amuses me endlessly. We’re a silly bunch of people with totally bizarre ways of acting and thinking. Well, you already know that we have a tendendy to drink heavily. Even the lamest excuse for a celebration is quite enough to get us going. Once again the whole summer was filled with different kinds of “events” all around the country disguised as “high culture”, “folk music festivals”, “community gatherings” and such. Sounds nice, huh? The silly thing is that whatever the theme for such an event is it exists merely as a cover for getting totally smashed.
On any given weekend one of the cities, towns or villages within a 50km radius is always celebrating something. All you really need to do is to come up with a reason for a party (it doesn’t have to be anything spectacular – for an example the birthday of a dead local celebrity is quite fine), announce it, print some banners, hang them up and tadaa – a new tradition has been born. Asking any finn the reason for consuming excessive amounts of beer in such an event will get you very funny answer.
“What do you mean why? It’s Martti’s birthday! It’s a tradition.”
“Who is Martti and how come you’re celebrating his birthday?”
“… … I have no idea. … Dude, don’t be a partypooper! Have a beer!”
*sigh*
This is just the most obvious peculiarity that strikes foreigners visiting Finland the hardest. If I started introducing the finns in this blog once a month it would be 2010 before you knew how weird we are.
“Cheers” or “kippis” to that!
