Apparel of Laughs
services: web design, t-shirt design
software: wordpress, woocommerce
Industry: fashion, retail
Apparel of Laughs is an online website that sells British, retro, and funny t-shirts and gifts. It was set up in October 2019 by myself as a way to sell my designs to the general public. I’ve been designing t-shirts for many years now, but never had a permanent place to sell that would be just for me. The site has already had orders from all over the world including Ireland, America, and Japan. It’s become a labour of love for me and a platform to design and learn.
the design
As mentioned this is my own personal site with my own designs, so the only person I had to please was me and hopefully my customers. While building the site I tried to add as much fun into the design as I could without it looking too odd or weird. It’s meant to be apparel of laughs after all. The site is mainly aimed at British people so I decided to go with a British colour scheme, red, white, and blue for the logo and the navigation. I chose to use a large slider with large images to highlight particular product categories as well as various ways to view the products.
Once the main site design had been nailed down it was time to add the content. I had quite a few designs ready to be put onto products, but I’ve added quite a few more since. There are now over 300 products on the shop spanning different categories including food, tv, art, and even politics. The type of products vary too; from t-shirts to hoodies, and mugs to prints, there is something for everyone. Every design on the site has been designed by me and is exclusive to Apparel of Laughs.
I have tried my best to make sure that my business is as ethical as possible. The shirts I print on received an A- in a 2019 ethical fashion report. All the packaging for our products is plastic free and all the ink used in the printing is vegan and toxin free.Â
the application
I used WordPress with Woocommerce built in to create the main ecommerce site. The plugin makes the whole shopping experience much easier for the customer and for me on the backend. The payment methods of the site are also handled by the plugin which makes it secure for customers to use without any headaches for me. Paypal and Stripe handle the payments and all I have to handle is the shipping. Talking of shipping, I was able to set up the site in such a way that the shipping for items is calculated on the buyer’s location (which can be worldwide) and by the weight of the product. This means every shipping cost is accurate to what it will cost me to send it.
Now the site is fully functioning and serving customers from all over the world, I can focus on creating more designs. The way everything is set up I can be sketching a design in the morning, finishing it off over lunch, creating the product in the afternoon, and selling it in the evening. Having the site has also led me to be creative with not only new products, but also advertising and publicity.
final thoughts
It’s great to have a place that’s almost an extension of my graphic design business. I now have somewhere I can market and sell my products to those all over the world. Its given me an outlet for all my weird and wonderful ideas that others might like too. It’s also given me a place to sell my designs without being beholden to other companies and businesses.