Why Bamboo T-shirts Are Awesome

If graphic design tees are the new art gallery, then bamboo is the new cotton. Finroo decided to celebrate their artists’ work by only printing on the best: 100% organic bamboo silk. Bamboo is pioneering the textile world towards a greener approach of textile production.

The mission:

Merited to be the fastest growing plant in the world, bamboo has a long history of being used as a raw ingredient for textiles in Asian and Middle Eastern countries, like China and Pakistan. From its cultivation to production, bamboo is nearly chemical free and a very green alternative to its competitors, especially cotton.

The feel:

Described as the perfect combination of silk and cashmere, Bamboo’s fine silk-fibers make for an excellent tee in both its look and drape. Its material is cooler than most other textiles and its strong fibers make it a more durable alternative.

Other aesthetic and green benefits include:

• Anti-microbial
• Resistant to mold and mildew
• Bamboo plant acts as shelter and food for many creatures
• Resistant to odors

check out our recent interview with the award winning blog "the abundant artist"

Sell Your Art on A Shirt with Finroo

theabundantartist on Aug 13th 2009

I (virtually) sat down with Eric Yohay, founder of the website Finroo.com, a site where artists can upload their art and have a limited edition set of high quality bamboo shirts printed with their work.  Finroo is in Beta right now, but they have some very good ideas on how artists can make money online and they have even taken a stand on educating artists they work with so that those artists learn how to do business online.

What’s your artistic & professional background?

I spent my earlier years dabbling in and out of graphic design classes and learned one thing fast. Graphic design is hard! Near impossible in you factoring in creating beautiful designs, and trying to find work. I quickly had to change my major because of this—but most of my friends stayed. I created Finroo to help them.

For 5 years I ran a web company helping major distribution companies manage their stressed inventory. When I realized I couldn’t find any good sites to buy trendy, cool designs out there I realized it was my time to come back to art.

How did you come up with the idea for Finroo, and when will you be out of ‘Beta?’

We started with a group of 5 artists and said “what are you missing?” They explained to me that although there were outlets for them to get their artwork out, they wanted more feedback and instructive criticisms on top of monetary rewards. We then created a dashboard that gave them the statistics and data that they asked for.

The first step was deciding from the beginning that our shirts, from the start needed to be TOP quality and needed to blow people away the first time they felt it. We then experimented with factories from all over the world and finally settled on one in Turkey that made it just right.

We then said now that our shirts are defiantly high quality how else can we WOW everyone. And that’s where we decided everything on the site would be limited edition and we would number each garment as it went out the door. Now that the kinks are worked out we will blast out of beta in September.

What’s the best way an artist can sell their work online?

There are two factors when selling art online. The first is they need traffic to their site. That’s why it’s always best to have your work listed on a site that already has traffic, rather than listing it on your blog. Once that step is done you still need to drive traffic to your listing. That will do two things.

1. Drive sales and user generated content to your listings

This will not only drive sales to your listings (great if you get paid on commission) but will increase your odds that people will comment on your work. User comments (good or bad) help reassure customers that this is a piece worth talking about (the first step in the buying process). Amazon is a great example where they show customer testimonials that greatly increase the buying decision. In fact it was quoted that Amazon’s products with user reviews have a 40% more of a chance to be bought then a product with no reviews.

2. Bring your product attention to the site owner where your goods are listed.

This is not so obvious, but if you can drive traffic to your products, your web hoster is more likely to promote that product more. A company that sells art is still in the real estate business (real estate being icons on their web page). Although they want to show every great product on the homepage, they can only show a limited number—and that’s why they show the ones that already draw in the greats audience and have the best chance of selling. If you can drive traffic and user generated content to your products, the company who is hosting your work will more likely give you attention.

How does Finroo fit into that?

We fit into the system in 3 major ways.

• We help artists get more exposure by letting them list their products through our system.
• We manage the operation by finding pallets for them to sell on, leaving them do what artists do best—create artwork!
• We help by acting as a resource for artists by giving them more info and tips on how to get more exposure.

We accomplish that by giving tools through a dashboard to let artists learn from the deep web data that we obtain. Our site lets users submit designs and gives them all a ranking. Our ranking is compiled from purchases, views, and votes, and the higher you’re ranked in all three categories the better your chances of appearing on the homepage (this updates every hour). But to rank in any of these three categories it all starts with page views and that’s where artists need to drive traffic to their products.  Finroo offers a weekly email with data and strategies to obtain views, and then by providing the web data back to our customers, we can see what works best. Here are the top 3 things that our artists use:

1. Selling via Facebook

Every time you change your status (and put a link to your product) all of your friends can see it. But if your friends interact with it (such as give it a thumbs up or comment) all of their friends can see it. We recommend instead of just writing a link to your work, artists write “Do you like my work? Give me thumbs up if you do!” You will defiantly see more results with the later statement.

2. Selling via Twitter

Twitter is a pure numbers game. If you don’t have a lot of followers then posting a link isn’t going to help you. There’s two ways around that, if you send someone message (use the @) and they write back, it will give you access to all of their viewers. We have found that this helps when you are making something for a cause such as an AIDS awareness shirt or something political. Since twitter is like a conversation, results happen fast. IE we find that when people post items on twitter we see results instantly—when compared to Facebook which can take a few days.

3. Selling via email

Email is one of the best ways to get peoples attention…but they need to be coming from the right source. If you were to email your friends, there would be a higher chance that they would open your emails and click on your links. But if you emailed people you didn’t know, you would have horrible results. That’s why when emailing it would be better if you could have your art gallery send out the blast rather than yourself. More important than that is the tracking info you need to implement on emails. By setting up tracking links, you can see what gets peoples attentions and then cater much better towards them.  [Editor's Note - You should build an email list that you use to keep in contact with your fans.  Services like ConstantContact or MailChimp will perform the tracking that Eric is talking about.]

You have several tutorials on the site that aim to teach artists how to use social media to engage people. Any plans to expand that?

Yes we plan on continuing our weekly update and introducing advanced social media selling and a few webinars in September. We are also currently bringing on some talented writers whose main job will be to update our tip list and help work with schools and organizations on helping show art to the rest of the world.