From the new Women’s Shirt to a whole collection

At the start of the year, I asked for your support in helping me find a new Women’s t-shirt. Thanks to all your feedback I was able to go into this project with concrete goals and wishes, and have explored all corners of the textile industry to find the right products for you, our customers.

A series of happy coincidences saw me leave Europe with a colleague for a few days and head to the beating heart of the world textile market – India! We spent around a week collecting everything we could (excluding exotic diseases) and had productive meetings and discussions with potential partners. We returned to the office with impressive and valuable impressions (all photographed for posterity) and a wonderful, new idea:

„There won’t just be a new Women’s t-shirt for 2013. If we’re going to do it, we’ll do it right, and release our own Spreadshirt collection onto the market!”

Here’s why:

• Firstly, we have a responsibility to our customers to make sure we can always deliver the products you want, in all colours and sizes! So far that hasn’t always been possible, even in the t-shirt market, as several producers were unable to meet their delivery times and left us hanging. Something had to change!

• We also find the certification of our products to be very important. Previously, with a few of our suppliers we seldom had the opportunity to personally assure ourselves and ensure that the implementation of the standards was adequate. Something had to change!

• Additionally, we want to ensure colour consistency between products for men, women and children, as we’ve already begun to introduce in other collections. We’ve been getting very positive feedback about this uniform colour scheming for our existing collections (like our popular sport collection), so we wanted to offer it for our future apparel ranges, too.

• It’s also important to us that our new collection not only has the right cut and shape, but also guarantees the best possible printing quality. We’ve already started testing and working on the quality optimisation and premium colour intensity for digital direct printing, in order to guarantee consistent high quality.

• Finally, we wanted to offer you a collection which is globally available in the same cut, colours and sizes. That means we want to offer alongside American Apparel a further alternative in quality clothing for men, women and children which you can sell to both American and European customers in your shops.

Now we’ve covered the background – What does it mean for you?

We’re planning to introduce a Spreadshirt T-Shirt Collection in Q1 2013.

• Available worldwide for men, women and children in the same 8 colours.
• Has the same cut in every country – a wider, round neckline, fashionable arm length and a form far removed from boxes, squares and quadratic forms
• Covers the whole spectrum of sizes
• Certified by GOTS, reach conform, Ökotex100 and individually traceable to the source

Those are the goals which will become our sign of quality. Here’s where we are right now:

We’re currently developing the patterns to be produced by our partners, in order to test them ourselves person.

Shortly you will be receiving more information and the first impressions of the new products. And finally, here are a few snapshots of our trip to India

[Show as slideshow]