One of the first tasks I like to get in to on a Monday morning is the website enquiries. While it can often be quite a menial task, the enquiry content can range from entertaining to frustrating. Today’s enquiries however brought with it a pleasant little surprise we’ve never had before. Here’s the email we got:
Subject: Marmite and Chips PrintFrom: KayleeEnquiry Date: 2010-03-28 22:11Hiya, I see the marmite and chips print is the retired prints page. I was just wondering tho, I want to get a tattoo of it but can't copy and save the picture in full so any chance I can get a copy off you guys? :)Chur!Kaylee.
Now, while I see it as a huge compliment to Joe’s talent with a pen and computer, it’s pretty crazy. I mean, seriously, it’s not a bad design (above), but is that what you want to look at when you’re like 70… marmite n chips? I’m kind of hoping that she was drunk, seeing as her email was at 11:11pm on a Saturday night, but who knows. Anyway, here are some tattoos that are pretty shit-house.
Remuera Hard bro.
get some.
it's not gay, it's just shit.
The piece de resistance: a diddle, as it is done, with veins.
We’re ALWAYS LISTENING to what you, our customers, are saying. Whether it’s through facebook, twitter, enquiries through the website, or feedback in-store – we always take note and every now and then we sit down and see if there’s any logic in what your saying. And there is.
Here’s a bunch of things you lot always seem to ask for:
• Can I get this on a v-neck? • Does this come in a kids tee? • Do you have this design on a hoodie? • The item I want is out of stock, when will you get it back? • Can you call me when this is back in stock?
Good news. We splashed out and bought a SCREEN PRINTING MACHINE. The bad news was there was no voucher in the ‘Entertainment Book’ for a screen printer. What are the odds? Anyway, it means we can print way quicker, and offer you more variety. So over the coming months we’ll be offering more style options to you per design.
We’ve decided that SUMMER is on the way too, so singlets are on the way ladies. So too is the scoop neck, just in case you wanted to show off your sternum in the summer sun.
My sister had a BABY and my brothers’ baby is now a TODDLER, so we’re going to be doing more 1 piece baby suits and toddlers t-shirts very shortly otherwise I’m screwed for Christmas presents this year. Plus all the Mums from the yoga class next door are really demanding, so we kinda have to print some more.
BUT THE BIGGEST BIT OF NEWS is that the ‘design of the day’ will now only be available for 24hrs. Thereafter, the design will go to the ‘RETIERD DESIGNS’ section. There you can vote for the design to be re-printed, and when the design receives enough votes you’ll be emailed personally letting you know first that it’s back. It means you’re going to have to be way quicker and check the website daily… Actually, the best way would be to JOIN THE NEWSLETTER and then you get an email with the design of the day straight to your inbox.
We realise that some people will be unhappy about this, BUT
• It’ll cut down on out of stocks of other designs • It’ll allow us to get your orders out faster • It’ll mean some of your shirts will be limited edition collectors’ items
And NO, we can’t call you when it comes back in stock. It’s much easier than that. Simply go to the product page of the t-shirt you’re after and head down to the ‘live stock chart’. There, just choose the size you’re after and click the ‘notify me when available’ text and you’ll be emailed when it’s available. Easy as.
Subject: idiot From: peter l*&^ard
Enquiry date: 2009-09-13 18:35
your coments on tv are ignorent and shocking. im an aussi here in auckland running a buisness as kiwis are to stupid to. aussie are in control of most buisnesses in new zealand as you are ten years behind us. if you want to call australians lazy say it to there faces. the kiwis i have working for me are the worst people i have ever been in control off .you are an idiot and i will relay this back to your aussie opostion and make sure that it gets harder for you. this is part of the world is forgotten as you have nothing to offer the world.
He thinks we’re idiots. Here’s 12 reasons why we’re smarter than him.
12. We use Capital letters at the start of sentences as well as for names of countries and people. 11. ‘Coments’ has two m’s. Comments.
10. ‘Ignorent’ is spelt ignorant. 9. im. I'm. It's like saying I am. That's a good way to remember it. 8. There’s an ‘e’ on the end of ‘Aussi’
7. Business. B-u-s-i-n-e-s-s. Not that hard. 6. This is a comma “,”. Try it some time. 5. To and too. Different words. 4. Say it to their faces Peter, not 'there faces'.
3. Have you been in control off them? Have you? nah. 2. ‘Oposition’. You mean opposition mate.
1. Just consider revising that last sentence.
Oh, and Peter. Please don't "make sure that it gets harder" for us. Please. Anything but that.
Following yesterdays tiff with those dudes in Australia, we’re totally stoked with the support we’ve recieved from our loyal followers. You guys are wicked awesome. Facebook comments, blog entries, Tweets, and emails flowed in. Sadly no facsimile this time however.
Anyway, I chucked a few up on the site for you to check out. Get in to it; it’s a good laugh. With regards to how we’ll proceed, we’re pretty happy to put this all behind us to be honest – they’ve taken up enough of our time. But it was fun.
I know they maintain, “there is nothing that could be considered plagiarism on the site”, and I could spend more time making screen shots of the text that I wrote on their website, but there’s no point. I’m done checking their website, I suggest you do the same.
The other day on Facebook some person recommended I become a fan of this site called Klub Retro, so I checked it out and noticed more than a few little similarities with Mr Vintage. As I continued to check out their content pages, I noticed that they’d copied our banners as well, and once I clicked through I realized that not only had they taken inspiration from our website, they had literally copied and pasted our copy from the website too! They're like us, but way more shit. They're designs are pretty amateur, but bless them for trying...
It’s pretty annoying that a company would just come along and blatantly steal so much from our website. We worked on that for ages and put a lot of work and time in to designing it, and for someone to come along and rip it off leaves us with a pretty shitty feeling in the stomach.
I’ve included a few screen shots to show you how much they’ve copied us…. But if you really want to help out, just email them (sales@klubretro.com) and tell them how strongly you disapprove of their blatant plagiarism. CC me in (jay (@) mrvintage.co.nz) and the best few emails will win free tees.
We got an email the other day from some dude who wasn’t all that happy about our t-shirts and, well, our site in general. We don’t get that many excessively negative emails like this, so I thought it’d be fun to reply to him and share the whole conversation with you guys. I think subconsciously I felt compelled to challenge this particular young man because he had the old ‘69’ included in his email address. I think anyone that has 69 in their email address needs a swift slap to the face. Sadly the correspondence didn’t last as long as I had hoped, but it might make for some interesting reading in any case.
Subject:Feedback on Daily Tees as Requested.
From:Dave Enquiry date:2009-07-07 12:36
Seriously Poor designs. I have no idea what your marketing strategy is, but can you honestly see people wearing the vast majority of these shit designs you have been spamming out.
I currently own two of your shirts; "Hamiltron City of the Future" and "Georgie Pie." The latter is the only great daily shirt release so far and the former is class.I once purchased "Keep NZ Beautiful" but literally threw it away after one wear - the Kiwiana design was great. However the Shirt was a poor cut, making me [6ft, 70kgs, slim build] look like a formless, raging fatty! It also was thick, coarse and picked up lint + fiber like crazy. Finally the transfer/decal was a horrible plastic that didn’t breathe or contour with the shirt folds.
Kiwiana is truly cool, but it needs to be mainstream to appeal to me. 90% of the designs that you have released in you daily t-shirt have been obscure and rubbish. I actually unsubscribed to the mail list for a time as it was painful to see. Added to this was the sheer dorkyness of some of the concepts. I hate being forced to explain a funny t shirt, it is akin to explaining a joke, and it loses so much when done.
I would suggest you look around some of the other Tee sites; 6dollartshirts.com, bustedtees.com, snorgtees and my favourite - palmercash.com.
I only frequent mrvintage on the forlorn hope you have required some class. Strangely some of the better designs have disappeared - e.g.; "Monopoly - I won $10 in a beauty contest" etc. I assume you pay a royalty fee so your margins are smaller, but variety and consumerism based shirts are rockin.
Thanks for your feedback, we appreciate all feedback here at Mr Vintage - good and bad.
I'm glad you have contributed towards our wages by buying a few of our t-shirts. That's great news. I'm sorry to hear our Marketing Strategy is not to your liking, but it appears that your opinion is in contrast to the majority of our customers - who have shaped this model.
I'm also sorry to hear the KNZB t-shirt wasn't to your liking, it may have been in the age of our first t-shirts, which were a little bigger. But your size dimensions do astound me, and I'm happy to say that Andy from work has made some suggestions. Andy spends a lot of time at the gym, and his body is a master-piece. He says that he too used to be a frighteningly skinny boy, and he would recommend that you begin to eat bigger meals; plenty of protein, carbs, and a whole lot of steak. After this he recommends you hit the gym and work your way in to a Men's Small. Prospective lady friends will too notice your increased efforts to look more manly and less rake-like.
Thanks for pointing out those websites, seeing as we're in the t-shirt industry we're always interested to see what other professionals are up to. I've circulated the list around the office, and we're all going to take turns on the only office computer that has Internet capabilities and check them out. We'll probably all sit around and talk about t-shirts while the web-pages are loading as well, as the connection via dial-up is not the quickest apparently. We want to unbundle soon. Amateurs.
Again, I find myself apologising. Our designs should never have been so obscure that you had to explain them to your friends. Please send my apologies to them for making them think - that was wrong of us, and I will make a promise to you: We will never design a t-shirt that makes you think. *Pinky Promise*.
I regret to inform you that in addition, we will not be altering our 'Marketing Strategy' for you. If you have any further concerns, please let me know and I will put my head together with Andy and come up with a suitable solution for you Kind Sir.
Regards,
Jay Govind
Prince of Marketing
Mr Vintage Ltd
From: Dave
To: jay@mrvintage.co.nz
Sent: Thursday, July 09, 2009 10:12 AM
Subject: RE: Feedback on Daily Tees as Requested.
Today we received a package from a customer who obviously has a lot of love and compassion in her heart. After hearing about our current plight, she sent in two bottles of wine. They were accompanied by this lovely note, and we are totally chuffed. The wine will definitely help pick us up.
Dear Mr Vintage,
I have always loved the creativity of your t-shirt designs, and my friends and family have enjoyed receiving them as gifts. I also love getting my t-shirt of the day email, as it always puts a smile on my face. I was really saddened to hear about the break in that happened to your Parnell store. I cannot replace what was taken, or make you feel more at ease about someone rummaging through your stuff, but I thought these couple of bottles of wine might help pick you up. All the best in getting everything sorted out.
Loyal fan
Kelly Reed
Northern Market Manager
Constellation New Zealand Ltd
This morning I pulled in to work and noticed Rob was outside on the phone. As I smiled gleefully, I observed that he was deep in conversation and had a facial expression resembling a frown. I thought to myself that this may have been because he got a little too steamed at Mardi Gras over the weekend and he still had an upset stomach. Turns out it wasn’t. We got ROBBED. It seems some people don’t care too much for paying for their computers, so they stole our 3 Macs as well as the till. At least they were smart enough to know that’s where the money’s kept. They weren’t smart enough to steal the mouse and the keyboard of one of the computers though! Mwah ha ha ha. We had the last laugh as it turns out.
Maybe it was the Hamburgler. Look at his cheecky little grin.
But seriously, it really sucks that they took the computers. We lost about a months’ worth of designs, and Joe works real hard on those designs, so it’s not very nice for Joe. And then we have to fill out a bunch of these insurance forms and stuff, which sucks – no one likes filling out forms.
We had to sit around for a while and wait for the cops to come and check out the crime scene for fingerprints and whatnot. When they did arrive, I was a tad dissapointed to say the least. I was expecting a CSI-like team to stroll in and take control of the situation. You know, a Gil Grissom or maybe a sunglass-clad Horacio popping in with his stylish suit and sharp brain. Instead we got a couple of balding, middle aged burly men in some kind of blue police jumpsuits. They came in, dusted down a few things, asked a few questions, jotted a few things down in their note pads and left. We probably won’t hear from them again. Because we lost a whole lot of our designs we’ll have to cancel the ‘t-shirt of the day’ specials for the rest of this week, so you can blame those cowardly thieves for that one.
We also had a pretty sweet promotion planned for Tuesday and Wednesday of this week that we’ll have to delay. So here’s the deal, we’re so scared about more of our stuff being stolen that we’re going to give a whole bunch of it away – so no-one will ever break in to our store again. Next week we’re going to give away over 150 prizes, and one MASSIVE amazingly awesome prize. Not even typing massive in capitals does it justice. So stay tuned to the Mr Vintage blog, our Facebook page, or our Twitter account for more details.
Sometimes we get ones that are ready to go straight to print: A play on 'The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe' I believe, this one was inspired by Dave Chapman's heart-warming story.
After we did the ‘Scary Washing Machine’ dinosaur t-shirts I think people thought we specialised in animal t-shirts or something, cos we ended up getting quite a few ‘design submissions’ like these two little guys.... I especially love that the dude who designed the singlet has been holding on to it since 2006 and felt it was now time to unleash it upon NZ. Believe it or not, these too were actually designed by different people. Grown-ups too.
Today I got an email that really makes me wonder why I send out the newsletter every day. This email was in reply to our email newsletter. Note: I believe onlnie is supposed to be ‘online’.
hiI never have time to get to your store for the one day specials (or very often anyway). Is there any way I can order onlnie?ThanksA####a
We’re thinking about doing a ‘Swine Flu’ t-shirt (below). But is it too bad taste? Do we print it or not? We want you to tell us. We reckon the design concept is pretty wicked, but we obviously realise it’s a pretty sensitive subject, so we want to ask you for some community input – we really appreciate all the feedback we get from twitter, the website, facebook, and our newsletters – and we really do take it all on board and consider your opinions on such matters. In this case, we’re leaving it entirely up to you... Vote here.
Here’s some stuff that we’ve been considering that you might like to consider also. There’s a whole raft of Swine Flu/ Bacon jokes and images going around the Internet at the moment. Granted, some of them are pretty crappy and tasteless, but all the same there seems to be a general feeling that the recent ‘Swine Flu’ panic may be in part an over-hyped media creation. Even old Peter Williams from Breakfast cracked a funny about it this week. And Peter’s one of the most inoffensive people around, he’s such a charmer I think you’ll all agree.
As we’ve done with a lot of our other designs, we’d of course donate 10% of each t-shirt sale to a charity – and not to use it as an excuse or justification – it’s just to show that we’re not money-hungry dicks that aim to offend and cause a stir. We’re all lovely boys. Each of our Mothers have said that. So the ball is in your court, the voting is open for 24 hours only (so send the link to all your friends and enemies) after which time we’ll close voting and make our decision depending on what you’ve told us. If the vast majority of you reckon it’s ok to release the design, we’ll go to print tomorrow, if not, it will all be forgotten and we’ll still have another sweet NZ Music inspired tee for you. Again, we know it’s a sensitive subject, we know lives have been lost – and in no way do we want to seem insensitive or disrespectful to the families of the deceased or the general public. Which is why we want your help, we appreciate and value your opinions so much that we’re letting you decide if this t-shirt goes to print.
Every now and then we get an email through the website that really just makes our day. This particular little gem is a very well written piece of fan mail regarding one of our female models (pictured below). It made us laugh.
Dear Mr Vintage team,
As I trudge through the wintry mire of sleet and suet complexions in London each morning, I think of home - primarily sand, water and happiness. Yesterday, feeling particularly tubercular and grey, I opened an email from you and was particularly buoyed. Your 'Paul Henry' model was delightfully fresh. She exemplified the best of our country; a true product of the plunkett system, abundant dairy products and compulsory sport in schools. Thank you. Please pass on my best wishes and the offer of a night on the tiles should she be passing through.
Nick.
Sarah. Causing quite the stir with her, ermm, Plunketty-ness.
Now, while I see it as a huge compliment to Joe’s talent with a pen and computer, it’s pretty crazy. I mean, seriously, it’s not a bad design (above), but is that what you want to look at when you’re like 70… marmite n chips? I’m kind of hoping that she was drunk, seeing as her email was at 11:11pm on a Saturday night, but who knows. Anyway, here are some tattoos that are pretty shit-house.
Remuera Hard bro.
get some.
it's not gay, it's just shit.
The piece de resistance: a diddle, as it is done, with veins. 
