MayFly99 - Talented Graphic designers needed for new British T-shirt brand

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thanks for the feedback mrp2049 - yes the designer will retain full copyright of their work. We are ideally looking for young, dynamic, up and coming designers who are looking to build their portfolio and at the same time want to earn some cash from their existing or new work. Pls send in a few of your designs. Would love to see them :)
 
Hi guys

We really value the design community, and want to make sure we are being as fair as possible for our designers and so, as promised, we have discussed the points raised in this thread.

Our intentions have always been to help up and coming artists get their break, and to fairly recompense them for their time and creativity, and we’re pleased to say we have managed to double the share for the designer to £3 for every tee sold, for the first three months after launch. At this point, we will review it, as then we will announce some exciting news for our designers, which will make their designs even more lucrative for them. This £3 represents a 43% share of the profit from every tee, as we are not cutting any corners with our tee and print quality in order to be the highest quality tees on the market, for this kind of venture, meaning they can now earn £297 for a successful design.

In addition to this, questions were raised over designers spending hours on a design, only to submit it and it be declined. Firstly, we will never reject a design out of hand. We will instead look at every design and, if it is not quite right in its current form, we will go back to the designer with comments on how it may be amended to become a Mayfly99 design. It is then up to the designer if they wish to do this. We also encourage designers to email us with their ideas / concepts / basic drafts for feedback if they are concerned they will spend another day perfecting a design, only for it to not be quite right. This means that if a designer has a good idea, they can email us a paragraph on what it will entail, and we can give an immediate response as to whether we are initially interested, along with constructive points on how it could be more suitable.

Finally, on the subject of exclusivity, we have also taken your points on board and have reached the following conclusion: In its current form, whilst our designers retain the copyright to their designs, due to our ‘Exclusive’ nature, we cannot run a design that has been run elsewhere, or will be replicated on clothing elsewhere for a period of one year after printing. However, we have discussed this, and we have more than halved the time in which they are not allowed to re-use the design on clothing to 150 days after printing, and we are also happy for the designer to use their design on clothing elsewhere 75 days after printing, if they alter it by a minimum of 20%.

At Mayfly99, we are passionate about giving the design community an opportunity to showcase their work and receive fair payment for it, and we also are committed to listening to the community at all times. We believe these actions shows these promises to be more than words, and we welcome future comments, good and bad, which we will always consider in our weekly meetings.

Thanks for your invaluable feedback, and feel free to ask any questions :)
 
Honestly, i like the idea. It's actually a piece of piss to think of a cool idea and make it in Illustrator. Typically i'd have a think on the way home, instead of reading the paper, now that in itself if a good 45 minute brainstorm, i'd come up with a cool idea in that time. When i got home i'd watch TV and sketch it out. Multi-Tasking like a woman. That'd take me about 30mins. Then i'd have a cuppa.

Once the Tea went down well, i'd sit in my comfy chair, and draw in Illustrator my design.

Then i'd submit it.

In a day i've made something class for myself, i've stretched my creative muscles, and i've got the chance to get some of MY work on a fancy clad T-Shirt, which other people are going to wear too. If i told a girl i designed this fancy pants t-shirt i'm wearing, she'd be waking up next to me the next day. And then she'd go buy one too.

Stop being uppity about a good idea and a worthwhile way to keep up your creativity and motivation.

In the end, you'll only have a few things people will remember you by, i'd like a frickin t-shirt to be one of them.
 
Reading the full brief has just sparked my brain with some great ideas I want to start sketching out... It's always after 1am that happens isn't it!
 
Hi again Nick. I want to address the points you left in your last message.

Firstly, I commend you for returning to the forum and addressing the points I and others have made. Secondly, I'm glad to see that you've raised the commission for designers on each t-shirt sold. However, I disagree with you that you want to "fairly recompense them for their time and creativity". I stick by my point raised a few days ago. You want to make a profitable business for yourself, rather than helping designers be profitable.

Whilst I realise that you need to make a profit, I still don't see how designers (at least in the initial stages of your business) will get a good return for giving you their designs. You say designers can earn £297 but you're selling the design for a day. One day. No designer in the initial stages of your business is going to be three hundred pounds richer because their design is NOT going to sell out.

You say that designers can email you an idea, rather than a finished product so you can tell them if you like the sound of it. With respect to you and those you work with, you're not Michael Beirut. You're just designers/marketers/PR and you're not going to be able to judge whether a hundred of these shirts are going to sell until they're actually selling so whilst I really do appreciate your willingness to help designers with ways forward, overall, it's not going to help sell more tshirts.

I'll commend you on the exclusivity point. If you state that the designer retains copyright to their design, then they should be able to do whatever they want with it and that includes selling it to other companies. However, it is of course your right to refuse such designs. I don't have a problem with it being three months or a year.

"if they alter it by a minimum of 20%" - This is just silly. What is 1%? What's 5%? You don't and cannot measure artwork in percentages!

Your willingness to go back to the drawing board with some of your policies is commendable and I hope that Mayfly99 does indeed succeed, but I do think it still needs some tweaking. I even have an idea to pitch to you.

You say that a designer can make up to £300. I'll tell you what, you give me £150, I'll design you a tshirt and I'll let you have all rights to it. If you're confident that you can sell £300 worth of stock, then you'll get your £150 back plus £150 extra.

I dare you.
 
Ha now there's a dare Anagoge. It is highly unlikely that anyone could sell that many t-shirts in a day even with months of crazy hype and a ton of support. Most people would spot that so the promised "potential payday" is a bit of a false truth. Most designers would have more confidence in you and be willing to do really brilliant work for your project if you chose fewer designs and offered a one off payment as Anagoge mentioned. As they say - if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
 
Hi guys

We thank you sincerely for your feedback, and we welcome your comments, and your best wishes for our launch.

We also want to reiterate our commitment to young, up-and-coming designers, many of whom struggle to get their work showcased on a national level. This is a cornerstone of our brand, and we strongly believe Mayfly99 does this, and rewards our artists very well and fairly within our current payment / benefits terms and artist-relationship practices. It’s also critical to us that all of our artists are equally important to us, so we cannot break these terms to be fair to all of our other designers.

We’re also delighted to report that, thanks partly to this forum, we’ve been inundated with hundreds of truly brilliant designs from many, many great artists over the past weeks, some of whom are graphic designers, some of whom are traditional artists, and some of whom are fashion designers – we’ve even had submissions from sculptors and graffiti artists!

Whilst the majority of designs have come from professional designers, we’re also delighted to have received some genuinely fabulous designs from purely armchair designers who do it for fun. We’re humbled by the response, and by the wonderful quality of our artists’ imaginations, and we’re looking forward to working with all of our designers personally when their design goes live.

However, despite this great response from the design community, the last thing we would want to do is to put anyone off sending something through, as we’re always looking for new and exciting artists from any discipline of visual art. Instead, we’d urge any artist out there who wants to do something extraordinary to submit ideas and / or designs to us at designers(AT)mayfly99.com. You’ll always find us personal, helpful and honest.
 
Hi Nick,

This is my first comment in this thread so apologies if already covered previously...

nickgibbens said:
We also want to reiterate our commitment to young, up-and-coming designers, many of whom struggle to get their work showcased on a national level. This is a cornerstone of our brand, and we strongly believe Mayfly99 does this
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How can you say that national coverage for their work is a cornerstone of your brand, a brand that is yet to be launched & presumably no media coverage or recognition. I can understand making this claim once you've launched and had some success, but to say you can showcase designs on a national level before launch of v.1, feels like a stretch of the imagination given the competition in the online tees market.
 
Hi Greg

Our main advantage is in the quality of our marketing, and our point of difference. It really is unlike anything else on the market.

How can we say that though? Well, besides the many launch and ongoing marketing activities, which we hope you understand but we can’t talk about until the launch or we’ll let the cat out of the bag with media, we’ve got two truly top marketeers on our board of directors – one in PR and one in social media.

Both have won many awards in their fields, and have set up our marketing to be genuinely different to every other competitors’ out there, making us a totally different option for our designers.

This highly original marketing has already guaranteed us a host of national coverage already, along with an advertising budget which will create a real buzz in the marketplace.

We understand how frustrating it is for you that we cannot divulge more details, but the trick to making the brand as successful as we are 100% confident it will be, is to make our PR and marketing as fresh and different as possible, so a certain amount of discretion is required.
 
nickgibbens said:
we hope you understand but we can’t talk about until the launch or we’ll let the cat out of the bag with media, we’ve got two truly top marketeers on our board of directors – one in PR and one in social media.
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I can understand & appreciate that, just out of personal interest can you tell us who the two top marketeers are? Or perhaps who they've worked with previously? So many of these types of sites pop-up and relatively few prosper or land on the success they're anticipating, so I'm always interested to see what makes a launch different, and who/how the ambitions will be acheived in reality.
 
I think it's fair of them to not reveal anything until they're ready to launch. It's their ace up their sleeve. ...well possibly.

Fully serious about my offer by the way. One tshirt design of your choosing, £150, all rights yours. If you are truly confident about a designer being able to make £300 *in one day* then this is a fantastic deal on your part. If my design did indeed make £300, I would sing your praises and happily admit I was wrong about you.
 
As we've said before, it’s critical to us that all of our artists are equally important to us, so we cannot break these payment terms to be fair to all of our other designers. Maybe in the future the payment structure could change.

The PR firm behind the concept is Polygon PR. They have worked with some leading brands over the last few years, inc Mercedes Benz, Wonderbra, Jeep, Odeon, Gala Bingo, and a new brand of shaving cream called The Bluebeards Revenge.

They really know how to generate a brand lots of great national and international coverage and have already come up with plenty of great PR ideas for launch, so watch this space as they say!!

Exciting times lie ahead, and we want every designer who uses this forum to be part of it :)
 
The Bluebeards Revenge -um never heard of it....

The others are well known brands in their own right purely due to the size of the companies, so not exactly in need of pr in the same way as the 'new' shaving cream one or in your case a new t-shirt company.
 
Going to close this thread now as I think it's run it's course. We don't really encourage speculative work/projects to be posted on the forums, but given your ready-ness (is that a word?) to respond to criticism and suggestions I kept the thread running to see where it lead :)

Good luck with your project.
Thanks, Greg
 
No, I locked it & Nick PM'd me asking to make a final reply, so I unlocked it & replied to let him know to post it so I could then lock it. That hasn't happened so here we go:

Thanks for keeping the thread open for soo long. I was just entering the following: "I was just giving some examples of prestigious brands the firm has worked on. They have also worked with smaller and up and coming clients like The Bluebeards Revenge and The Shaving Shack. The former has received some amazing press coverage since its launch in July 2010, inc a full page 3 in the Daily Express, Nuts, Men's Health Magazine, FHM, This Morning, BBC Radio, ITV, and a number of leading consumer blogs and portals. This is a deadly serious venture we will be launching and we will be aiming to make Mayfly one of the leading T-shirt brands in the UK."

But it came up saying it was closed. Could you add it for me?

Its been a great debate and I have really enjoyed the banter and suggestions put across.
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