When our friend Kevin Hoffman—organizer of the IA Summit on April 3–7 in Baltimore—asked us to print the t-shirts for his conference, we jumped at the chance. When he told us that Scott Thomas—aka Simple Scott, design director for the 2008 Obama campaign and co-creator of The Noun Project—would be designing them, we were even more excited.

The tees feature the conference slogan—OBSERVE BUILD SHARE REPEAT—on the back, and illustrated in icon form on the front. You can buy the tees at the conference…or we’ll be selling them on United Pixelworkers during the conference. The IA Summit tees are printed on super-soft heather black American Apparel poly-cotton. Don’t miss out.

We’re huge sports fans here at United Pixelworkers, and the NCAA Tournament is one of our favorite sporting events of the year (confession: sometimes we even take days off from work to watch the first round). When Studio Neat (makers of the Glif and Cosmonaut) launched a new bracket pool app called Simple Bracket, we thought to ourselves, “we need to do something big with this.”

Turns out our pals at Dribbble were thinking the same thing, so we teamed up to bring you The Brackets, the first annual NCAA Tournament bracket mega-pool for the web and design community.

All you need to do to join is download Simple Bracket from the App Store (iPhone only this year, sorry Androids), search for the “DribbbleUP” pool, enter the pin number (2013), and you’re in! We’re giving away some incredible prizes to the winners, including swag from us, Dribbble, Shopify, and Studio Neat…and the grand prize pack for the champion: an iPad Mini, a special one-off “The Brackets Champion 2013″ t-shirt, and some serious bragging rights. We’ll be collecting other sponsors through the week, so (hopefully) the prize pool will keep growing.

The tournament starts Thursday (noon EDT), so join the pool and get your picks in soon!

Two years ago, we warned you that making t-shirts ain’t all fun and games. But did you listen? No. You went out and made yourself a little side business selling shirts. Maybe you created a Kickstarter to launch your new store, or you run a popular design website with an equipment shop, or maybe you’re not hitting that kind of volume yet, but you see it around the corner and don’t know what to do. Relax, we’re here for you. Get ready to take a crash course in selling and shipping 1,000 tees a month.

We’re not Threadless, but having grown two orders of magnitude since starting this little union, we know the pain of scaling in every part of our operation. What’s the difference you ask? Everything.

Printing

Let’s start at the beginning. Before you can sell a shirt, you need to have a printer. We’ve been through three printers in less than three years, so trust us when we say, you need the right printer. When we started, we did our research. We wanted someone local, someone good, and someone cheap, so we looked around Pittsburgh and found someone who met all three criteria—or so we thought. We definitely found local and cheap, but good eluded us. Don’t get us wrong, at the time we thought our shirts were great. Today, we look back and cringe a little at the quality. Sometimes it’s subtle things like color fidelity and registration clarity. Sometimes it’s big things like plastisol caked on so heavy you could swear you’re wearing a hockey sweater. Unless you’ve been in the garment industry your whole life, you’re going to want to find a printer who knows more about ink, fabric, and production than you. Don’t settle. Look around until you find the right team. They’ll make you better, and your customers will thank you.

New shirt on top, old one on the bottom. Note the sharpness of the new style.

You know how I mentioned “production” as something your printer needs to know about? Yeah, that’s a big one. In addition to some less than sharp printing we had in the early days, we were also plagued by issues with quality control. In fact, our entire first guest design batch had to be re-printed because of a problem with the curing process. Needless heartburn, all around. Those kinds of issues eventually forced us to switch to a company in Kansas City that has a tremendous reputation for professional, high-quality work. And they deserved it.

We used them for one big print run before realizing that Kansas City is a long way from Pittsburgh. What if we wanted to drop by for a press check? What if we wanted to talk strategy, fulfillment, long-term plans? You can see our dilemma. Thankfully we bumped into a guy who ran a print shop that met all three of our needs. He was local, he did great work, and his prices were even better than we had been getting before. A hat trick! For the last year-and-a-half we’ve been humming along with Clockwise Tees as the printer of record for United Pixelworkers. As many a Pixelworker can attest, they make a mean shirt. Like any relationship, we’ve had our share of problems, but because our printer is nearby, we can work them out with the least amount of disruption for us and our customers. You want to make and sell a quarter-ton of t-shirts a month? Find a good printer.

Selling

It’s not enough to design a sweet shirt, you’re going to need to let people know and have a rock-solid website to receive and process orders. Letting people know is what you might have heard referred to before as “marketing”. It sounds scary, but it’s actually really simple. That’s why we like to call it “letting people know”. When we got started, we sent friendly emails to the people in the industry we admired. In addition to mentioning how much we liked the work they did, we sent each of them a shirt. That got us started, but it takes a lot more than a bit of early reciprocity to see a healthy six figures in annual revenue and nearly 7,000 followers on Twitter. Selling anything, whether it’s a physical product, a website, or an idea requires trust. One customer sale is noteworthy, two is a relationship. When your best customers come back for more every month and voluntarily spread the word to friends, you know you’re doing something right.

We take an insane amount of pride in every aspect of Pixelworkers (and Pixelivery) from the business model to the shirt design to the production to the fulfillment to the customer service. Having done this now for over two years, it’s pretty clear that our peers and colleagues are proud to represent themselves as Pixelworkers. Just take a look at these handsome folks. That means a lot to us. We unabashedly believe that if you want to have a successful business of any kind, you need to treat your customers well.

That’s two-thirds of marketing. The other half is greasing the wheels. Run a sale every so often, give some stuff away, share the spotlight, have a contest just for fun, ask people what you can do better, get your name out there in blogs and podcasts. We like to think having a beautiful, functional, mobile-friendly website helps too. Oh, and spend some money every once in a while. We’ve sponsored several conferences including the upcoming HybridConf and ConvergeSE (where we’re also going to be speaking, say hi!), run ads on The Talk Show, The Evening Edition, ShopTalk, and a handful of other mediums, and we actively review our options for spreading the word even further. Bottom line: plan to spend 10-25% of your time and money marketing your product. Do it in a way that aligns with your personal and business beliefs. If you believe in your product, you should be happy to do what it takes to let people know. (Without being a jerk, of course.)

Did we mention a fancy ecommerce site? I think we did. When last we talked, we were hosted by the excellent Big Cartel. We’ve since switched to Shopify for reasons outlined in a blog post last year. Whatever direction you go, a hosted solution makes selling shirts by the car load trivial for even the least technical person. Both Shopify and Big Cartel have very reasonable monthly costs. Shopify has a big advantage today with its app store. There are integrations for just about every aspect of running a modern web shop. If you’re looking for or already have high volume, we can’t avoid recommending you go with Shopify.

You’ll also want to keep a close eye on your payment processor. For a long time (dating back to our Big Cartel days), we used PayPal. There’s a lot to like about PayPal. Customers who don’t have a credit card can still check out and the total fees are less than those you might pay with another provider. Unfortunately there’s a whole lot more to hate about PayPal. It’s slow (in every possible, conceivable, eye-clawingly irritating way), they’ve been known to lock you out of your funds on more than one occasion, and the interface is a relic of the time when they had founders who cared. We switched to Stripe in March of 2012, and it’s been a dream in every way that PayPal was a nightmare. You won’t get your money for seven days and the flat 2.9% is a little more than you’d pay elsewhere, but the interface is amazing and the processing absolutely flawless. We’re happy to put our money behind a company that we can feel good about. (We probably lose about $200 each month in additional fees.) Our bank offers us same-day access to our funds and a 2.3% rate, but there’s no way to sign up for their service without going through a sales rep and we can only imagine the travesty that would be their web interface.

Do yourself a favor, use Stripe. They’re eating everyone’s lunch at the bottom of the market now, and it’s only a matter of time before they own the top as well. Just like Flash died a slow and predictable death when HTML5 became the only option on mobile, payment processing is a classic innovator’s dilemma. Payment processors were so focused on high-volume customers they didn’t even see small businesses switching en masse to a better product. (And don’t forget about Square. They’re coming from the physical side, but you can count on these two annihilating the competition in the next 3-5 years.)

Shipping & Fulfillment

In 2010, our shipping advice was:

Ship all your packages with USPS, and tell them to send it as cheaply as possible, with no tracking or delivery confirmation. One t-shirt should cost about $2.50 to send anywhere in the country, and no more than $6 to anywhere else on Earth. As bad as shipping is, it’s a necessary evil. Grin and bear it.

Let’s talk about what’s changed in the interim (aside from USPS jacking their prices up). The first big advance for us was switching to online postage and bulk label printing. We use Endicia, and it’s great. There may be other options out there, but Endicia comes with native apps for Mac and Windows. If you’re savvy, you can also save a lot of time by learning how to do bulk address imports. The difference between hand-labeling and point-and-click printing is astronomical. If you’re shipping more than a handful of t-shirts each month, invest in online postage and labeling.

Not long after switching to Endicia, we started wondering if we couldn’t leverage its API to make our lives even easier. There’s still a non-trivial amount of prep work that needs to happen when you’re schlepping spreadsheets around, so we decided to design and build a custom fulfillment application. Since we had switched to Shopify, we had access to all our orders via the Shopify API. Now every order that comes into United Pixelworkers is automatically saved to our local database and queued for fulfillment. At the touch of a button, we print packing slips and shipping labels ready to be affixed and stuffed by whoever has time. (Every packing slip and label to come out of United Pixelworkers has been printed on the Brother HL-2270DW wireless laser printers. It’s a workhorse.) Our fulfillment prep work dropped from hours to seconds. But what if you don’t have a back-end developer on hand? That’s where you’re going to get a lot of mileage out of the Shopify App Store we mentioned earlier. Our personal favorite is ShipStation (we tried it, and even though it wasn’t right for us, they have tremendous customer service and it’s getting better all the time), but there several great options to choose from in the shipping category, so look around and see what’s right for you.

The third wave in our quest to get smarter with shipping was having USPS come to us. Once upon a time we used to load up our car with boxes and boxes of packages. The post office kindly let us in the back door so we wouldn’t disrupt the other customers, but the loading, unloading, and driving still occupied an entire afternoon. Not smart. Thankfully,  USPS will come to you! Just schedule a pickup. For awhile we were scheduling one big pickup each month and then a pickup each week. That was fine we most of our sales were in big pre-order batches, but you probably noticed we’ve been ramping up our inventory. We made a call to our local post office to arrange for the mailman to swing by every day for a box or two of shirts. If you’re shipping in volume, do yourself a favor, let the mailman come to you.

Finally, our fourth improvement: help. For nearly the entire history of United Pixelworkers, every shirt leaving our office was packed by Jay, Nate, or Matt. As I hinted earlier, we still like making websites for clients from time to time. The bigger United Pixelworkers got, the less time we had for clients and even improvements to the site itself. Because we invested in our custom fulfillment application, however, we were able to turn over the packing labor to a friend. Truthfully, anyone can do it or everyone can do it. The more water-tight the process, the less technical knowledge each person needs to bring to the equation. When we were juggling spreadsheets and squinting at PayPal, fulfillment was a nightmare. Today, we could bring a person in off the street and have him or her up and running in minutes.

Even with all our improvements, shipping is still a tedious and complicated process. Addresses can be malformed, international packages frequently take weeks to arrive or sometimes disappear entirely, inventory requires more and more space in the office leading to money being tied up in shirts on shelves, packages return to our office almost daily as undeliverable, and as we’ve expanded our offering into different types of merchandise like notebooks, patches, hats, and prints packaging diversity has reared its ugly head.

We’ve come a long way, but keeping shipping in house has required the upfront investment of hundres of hours to time. We believe controlling the experience is worth it, but if you’re simply looking to be the shirt designer, there are services that you can use to handle your shipping process. If you poke around the Shopify App Store, you’ll probably even find ones that are ready to be integrated into your store.

Customer Service

Customer service can be a nightmare, but we’ve learned to love it. Here are some but not all of the types of emails we get:

• my shirt doesn’t fit
• my shirt is defective
• I got the wrong shirt
• I need to change my address
• where’s my shirt?
• do you ship to my location?
• when will the shirt I want be back in stock?

When you’re selling a few dozen shirts each month, inbound emails and tweets are hardly a trickle. Multiply your sales by 10 or 20, however, and the requests quickly become a flood. If you want to retain your sanity, heed our advice.

First, get some customer service software. We use Zendesk. You probably can’t go wrong with any of the bigger names, but for the reasons we outlined in a post last year, Zendesk is right for us. Good customer service software lets you set up macros (a set of instructions that can be applied to an incoming email) to handle common inquiries. We have several that get used every day. A good macro will handle about 90% of the work leaving you with just a few seconds or minutes of personalization and attention before moving on to the next email.

Second, decide how you want to handle each situation before it arises. It’s not uncommon for someone’s shirt to get lost in the mail through no fault of their own. Are you going to give them a refund? A replacement? Will you tell them that it’s not your problem? How about when a customer wants an exchange? Maybe they got the wrong size. Shopping online can be a great experience since you never leave your chair or a terrible experience since you have to rely on pictures and charts to make a decision. As the retailer, you’re going to have people who want exchanges. What do you do? I can tell you what we do. We look at each customer request as an opportunity to make someone’s day. Every dollar we spend making someone happy is an investment in our company and its future. Happy customers tell their friends and they buy more stuff. It would be incredibly short-sighted to focus on the immediate cost rather than the long term dividends. Plus, making someone happy feels good whereas its exhausting to pick a fight with everyone just looking for a little help.

Finally, because the customer service process has been centralized and no longer lives in your email and because you decided ahead of time how to handle common requests, you can hand customer service over to someone you trust so you can go back to designing shirts, marketing your site, or whatever you’d like to be doing. The nice thing about retail is that most aspects of it can be considered as independent chunks. As your sales volume increases, you can find discrete pieces to offload onto someone else.

Now You’re Ready

That’s it. Go forth and sell t-shirts. If you have any questions about the techniques we mentioned above or you’d like us to address an area we failed to cover, let us know in the comments or give us a shout on Twitter.

Or, maybe all of that was a little overwhelming. Maybe you tried printing your own shirts in the past and quickly found it wasn’t for you. Well, we’ve got good news. Starting soon, like real soon, we’re going to be launching a store where anyone can pitch us a tee about pretty much anything. If we like it, we’ll put it in the store. Your design gets two weeks to sell 25 or more shirts. If it’s successful, we’ll print and ship it and handle all the customer service as well. Plus we’ll pay you $3 for every sale. Does that sound like something you might be interested in? Email us at us@unitedpixelworkers.com. If you have some artwork you want to include, even better. Making great shirts is a passion of ours and it just so happens that giving our friends and colleagues a helping hand is too. We’re champing at the bit to roll out our new t-shirts-as-a-service offering. If you you’re as eager as we are to see it live, we want to hear from you. Make some noise.

We started a new podcast, it’s called Origin Story, and before you start listening, we thought it made some sense to tell you its own origin story. We listen to a lot of podcasts here at Pixelworkers. We love podcasts, and our industry is full of great ones. But our favorite podcasts are the ones you can get lost in…This American Life, Radiolab, conversations between good friends like Roderick on the Line, and interviews with interesting people. When we set out to start our own podcast, we wanted to create something like that, something that we’d like listening to, and we thought the best format for us would be an interview podcast.

Now we know what you’re thinking, “not another interview podcast.” And you’re right, there are a lot of interview podcasts out there, especially in our industry, but they all tend to follow the same format: the guest tells the host a little bit about their background, then spends the rest of the time plugging their newest thing and answering questions about the things in the past that made them well-known. That’s great, and we love those podcasts too, but we wanted to flip that formula on its head. We want to dig deeper into our guests’ backgrounds, learn what their childhood was like, where they grew up, what experiences shaped them as people, what they like to do when they’re not worrying about websites and apps. If possible, we don’t want to talk shop at all. We do enough of that as it is. But for as much time as we all spend together on Twitter and at conferences, we know surprisingly little about each other as people. So we started Origin Story to fill that gap.

This is very much an experiment for us. We know how to make websites, and we know how to make t-shirts, but podcasting is uncharted territory. We don’t know how many of these we’re going to do…it might be three episodes, it might be six, or we may never stop. But if you keep listening, we’ll keep making them.

If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for future Origin Story guests or episodes, drop us a line at us@unitedpixelworkers.com or say hi on Twitter @pixelworkers. Thanks for listening.

According to our friends at The Clink Room / Brandiose, our hat order goes to New Era tomorrow! We should see samples in about a month, and our entire hat order will be done by Feburary or March. Wanna know what they’ll look like?

Back in August, we started kicking around the idea of making United Pixelworkers hats. The next question was: fitted or snapback? We asked you guys on Twitter, and the response was overwhelmingly in favor of fitted caps (we agreed). Now, if you’re gonna make fitted hats, they’d better be New Era 59FIFTYs. For the uninitiated, the New Era 59FIFTY is the official on-field cap of Major League Baseball, and the de facto standard when it comes to fitteds. So we started digging around, trying to figure out how to make custom 59FIFTYs. How hard could it be, right? Turns out, it’s very hard.

If you want to make custom 59FIFTYs, you have two options. Option 1: you can be an amateur sports team looking for team caps, in which case you go through one channel and one channel only, Top It Off Hat Co. If you choose this option, New Era makes sure that you’re actually a team. They want to see a letter on league letterhead, or a photo of your team jersey. If they get one whiff that you’re not a sports team, they shut your order down. We tried Option 1 and you can imagine what happened. So what’s Option 2? You can apply to become an official New Era retailer. Sounds easy, except that requires a brick-and-mortar store, photos of the interior and exterior of said store, and a guarantee that your first order will be for at least $10,000 worth of merchandise. Seeing as how we couldn’t meet any of those requirements, Option 2 was out. We were stuck. So once again, we turned to Twitter for help.

After a few false starts, we were referred to Brandiose, designers of fun and brilliant sports identities everywhere (thanks to Cam Hoff). Ever seen those crazy AAA minor league baseball teams like the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, the Richmond Flying Squirrels, or the Casper Ghosts? Brandiose conceived and designed them. Turns out they have a side project called The Clink Room, where they make and sell New Era 59FIFTYs for all sorts of fun things: fake sports leagues, skate shops, and other brands. We contacted Casey and Jason (the childhood friends who co-founded Brandiose), and they were game for a collaboration to make us a hat. They only had one stipulation: they wanted to design us a mascot. After a few months of collaborating, we’re ready for you to meet him. Introducing the Pixel Blacksmith…

We smile every time we see this little guy. The Clink Room couldn’t have come up with a better mascot for our industry: tough, dedicated, hammering away at those pixels day and night. Honestly, we can’t believe our luck in finding Casey and Jason. They’ve been incredibly generous with their time and attention, and their work is second-to-none.

So, long story short: hats are coming in about three or four months. Two hats, in fact: a Standard Issue hat with the UP logo you know and love, and a second hat with the Pixel Blacksmith. We can’t wait.

Why not jobs? We’re a fake union. It’s about time we did something to help real web designers, developers, and the rest of you Pixelworkers. Think of this as the bulletin board at the local union get-together. If there’s a spot opening up over here and a guy or gal looking for a job over there, it makes sense for us to help them find each other.

If you’re a hard-working man or woman, bookmark Jobs for Pixelworkers. Better yet, follow @pixeljobs on Twitter and subscribe to the Jobs RSS feed. We’ve got positions from Shopify, Happy Cog, Mule Design, and InVision available now with many more to come.

If you’re a business looking for bright, passionate, handsome people, you could do a lot worse than our little battalion of Pixelworkers. Posting a job is just $99 for 30 days. You bring the details (including your own listing page), and we’ll send the troops.

United Pixelworkers has grown from a tiny side project that nobody knew about to kind of a big deal. It attracts tens of thousands of visitors every month, gives our local USPS all they can handle, and keeps us busy for a large portion of almost every day. And we couldn’t be happier. The job board is the first of what we hope are many steps beyond t-shirts. Stick with us, we’re going to have some fun.

We are proud to introduce our second t-shirt shop, Pixelivery. What is Pixelivery? Over the last few years of making t-shirts for United Pixelworkers, we’ve pixelated a whole lot of stuff: states outlines, city landmarks, famous buildings, Robocop. It occurred to us that civilians—AKA non-web design nerds—might like these things on t-shirts too…only, minus the Pixelworkers business. So we came up with Pixelivery, an online shop full of fun, pixelated t-shirts. Want to follow along? Buy a tee, follow us on Twitter, or sign up for the mailing list. We’ll be launching new stuff every week or so.

**UPDATE: Congrats to Paul Marek, our RemixSouth conference pass winner. Thanks to everyone who entered.

Hey, friends. Guess what? We’ve got another conference ticket to give away! On October 19th & 20th, RemixSouth will be taking over Atlanta. Come hone your UX, design, development, and business skills with speakers like Bill Buxton, Carl Smith, J Cornelius and a host of other talented men and women.

As usual, all you need to do to qualify is leave a comment below explaining why you deserve to be selected. One winner will be chosen as our favorite. Please don’t enter if you can’t realistically make it to Atlanta October 19-20 because you’re responsible for your own travel arrangements. Make sure to leave us your email address so we know how to get in touch with you in case you win. Contest ends Wednesday, October 3 at 5pm EDT. We’ll announce the winner shortly thereafter. May the best pixelworker win.

We’re back after a month-long hiatus and, as you can see, things are a little different around here.

WHY WE WENT AWAY

The most frequent question we’ve been asked lately is “Didn’t you guys just redesign the site?” Yes. Yes we did. Our last revision launched in January of this year, and looking at the numbers, it’d be hard to call it anything but a success. We’ve sold more tees in 2012 than we have at any other point in our brief history (and it’s not even close). But as much as people liked the last site, we started to see its warts almost immediately. It was the first responsive website we’d ever created, and boy did we make some mistakes. It was a monster, and didn’t run very quickly. There was too much competition among pre-order shirts, so while we sold a bunch of tees collectively, no single shirt was ever able to shine. We had a bunch of in-stock tees, but they were buried in the site and hard to navigate. The month-long pre-order cycle was inefficient: a lot of dead space sandwiched between rushes at the beginning and end. We’ve learned a lot since January. The new site is the result of a lot of accumulated I-wish-we-had-done-this’s, and it was time for a change.

WHAT’S NEW

The biggest change? We’re done with the old way of selling tees: a dozen or more new shirts available for a month-long pre-order window. The new way? A few featured shirts (or even just one), available for a week-long pre-order window, with a foundation of in-stock shirts that are available at any time. The new model allows us to focus the attention on only a few products (like it used to be), it reduces the turnaround time that you guys are waiting for your orders to ship, it narrows the overwhelming choice that we’ve thrown at you recently, and increases our flexibility on the timing of when we run certain shirts. It may look like there are even more shirts to buy since they’re changing so often, but there aren’t.

We’ve built up quite a collection over the past two years. Now you can search, filter, and browse every shirt we’ve ever made. Want to see everything we have available in your size? You can do that. Want to see all the local tees? You can do that too. If we don’t have your shirt (or size) available, let us know on that shirt’s page. If there’s enough interest, we’ll bring it back, and we’ll restock popular tees as often as we can.

You may have noticed that we’ve been giving a lot more stuff away lately, namely conference passes to Web Design Day and the Circles Conference. We’re hoping to ramp that up in the coming months with conference passes, books, software, etc. The web design community keeps us going, so we want to give back in whatever way we can.

Regarding the design and infrastructure of the site, we wanted it to be faster, smarter, responsive, and as resolution-independent as possible. No more just-make-it-bigger responsive design; now when you increase your window size, you actually see more of the site at once. All images are served to you at the appropriate resolution, so you’re always looking at a crisp product shot. All icons (including the logo) are served using a custom icon font. We’re particularly proud of the new header we designed (play around with making the window bigger and smaller to see how it works). United Pixelworkers has long been our experimental lab, and if you’ll allow us to toot our own horn, we think this is the best website we’ve ever made.

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

In planning the next version of United Pixelworkers, we knew we wanted to improve the performance, flexibility, and richness of the experience, so when it came time to make the design flow across the page regardless of window size or serve high-res images to devices capable of displaying them, we were faced with a choice: write a whole bunch of code or find libraries that had the features we wanted. In the end, it wasn’t much of a choice. So many smart people have made useful tools available for free or at very reasonable prices.

Here are just a few of the ones we found to be helpful for this iteration:

• Isotope from David Desandro. Used for our perfect grid layout (with a little assist from our own Matthew Chambers), Isotope is Masonry‘s big brother. It’s all grown up with wicked animations and buckets of options.
• Foresight.js from Adam Bradley. After looking at all the options, Adam’s seemed like it made the most sense. Specify the image (almost) like normal, and use stylesheets to control which image is displayed when. Neat.
• Enquire.js from Nicky Williams. A solution for targeting JavaScript at window sizes that won’t make you pull your hair out.
• jQuery Zoom from Jack Moore. An über-simple drop-in for having zoomable images.
• jQuery Timers, jQuery Form, and jQuery Placeholder

The old standbys that seem like they’ve made it into every project for years:

• Modernizr
• jQuery
• Typekit
• Sass
• HTML5Boilerplate

And, of course, the platforms that make it possible for us to take all your money without having to worry about losing it, Shopify and Stripe.

A modern website can’t exist without the tireless work of hundreds of people who have shared their tools and techniques over the years. We’re especially thankful to the folks above (and, of course, Mr. Responsive Web Design Ethan Marcotte) for hacking their way through the thickest of jungles so that we can be where we are today.

WHAT’S NEXT?

We promised more products, and more products are coming. We asked you on Twitter about hats, and the response was overwhelming, so hats are happening (in fact, the hat saga deserves its own blog post, so we’ll write something up soon). We’ve been thinking about prints for a long time, and they’re coming too. Pixelivery will (finally) launch later this year in a big way. We also want to start offering fun and inexpensive schwag: things like patches, pens, pencils, pin and sticker packs. All that stuff is in the works.

But more than that, United Pixelworkers always deserved to be more than just an online shop, and we’re starting to realize that potential. A podcast is coming to reintroduce you to some of your favorite pixelworkers. A membership program is coming to reward those of you who keep coming back to us time and time to again. And there are a few other big things in our plans that we’re not quite ready to lift the lid on yet.

THANKS

As always, none of this is possible without the continued loyalty of you guys. We started off two years ago selling a few dozen tees a month, hand-writing addresses on envelopes, bringing armloads of packages to the post office. Now we routinely sell hundreds of tees a month (sometimes over 1,000), and the post office comes to us! We’ve sent our tees to dozens of countries around the globe, gotten to work with a bunch of our idols, and seen our tees on the backs of people in Instagram photos, in web videos, and at conferences. Hell, Aaron Draplin even designed our logo. It’s more than surreal. Thanks for letting us do what we love to do. We promise there’s more awesome stuff coming down the road. Stay tuned.