Corporate polo shirts by GMtee

Back in September last year when I wrote "You wouldn't Ask Armani" and said that GMtee doesn't do custom shirts, I should have added an important qualifier: Order several hundred shirts and we'll do whatever you ask!


Our friend Malcolm recently put us in the way of a decent order for corporate polo shirts from his company ITG. GMtee has never actively pursued this kind of business. We had assumed that the corporate gift and premiums market was already well-served by companies that were better equipped to produce this type of shirt. We had also assumed that most companies didn't have the class to buy a quality shirt.


Well, it seems we were wrong! ITG is one classy company. They had shopped around and sourced samples of the usual tacky pique polos, but decided these weren't good enough. They liked our fabric and design and especially liked that they were able to order shirts dyed to their own corporate colour specification. To my surprise, we were competitive on price too.

It will be 60 days before our manufacturer delivers the shirts. So far everything is proceeding smoothly. ITG has approved the fabric colour, but the first embroidery sample was unsatisfactory. We'll keep sending it back until it looks right!

With our past sales data we were able to advise on size breakdown (the number of shirts to order in each size) and we added a new XS size for the ladies.

GMtee won't make a huge profit on the sale since our mark-up is quite modest. We do benefit in other ways though - we will be adding a special promotional hang tag to encourage the recipients of ITG's shirts to buy some other GMtee shirts.

So, if your marketing department is planning to order shirts, do please get in touch. We'll make you a beautiful shirt that people will actually want to wear!

Fashion, not politics

Trouble is brewing in Tibet. As I understand it, the Tibetan people object to being governed by the Chinese and resent that they have no representation.


But what does GMtee know about politics? We're fashion designers. We made this shirt because we thought it looked nice. It's called "Free Tibet" and is a tearful representation of the Tibetan flag.

We have sold several of these shirts in the last few days. It's good to know that the Tibetans are not forgotten. I hope we don't look like we're profiting from their misery. That has never been our intention, and we designed "Free Tibet" a couple of years ago as an expression of sympathy and solidarity.

We've still got a few left in stock at US$34.95 (+ $5.00 shipping). It's available with long sleeves or short sleeves. Only at GMtee could you buy a "Free Tibet" T-shirt that was designed and manufactured in China!

Time to Kill

Wow! It's been slow around here the last couple of weeks. Plenty of traffic but only half the sales!
Perhaps it's just the time of year. February was our worst month last year and was weak in previous years too.

So, with time to kill, I've been visiting my favourite eBay discussion boards: the eBay Stores board and Seller Central. In the last week or two, since eBay announced some important new changes, the boards have been dominated by protest threads and calls to boycott. Perhaps by the time you take a look, the boardies will have returned to their usual fare such as "Image of toast appears on face of Virgin Mary!!!".

I don't mean to sneer. The eBay boards are a great resource, especially for an e-commerce newbie. But some members eventually tire of the name-calling and mangled grammar and go off to start their own forums. As it happens, I was invited to join one just today called Creative Shop Talk. It's only a month old and is aimed at the small website owner.

I'm the newest member and I recognise many of the others from the eBay Stores board. Thanks to Alana and Avid Cat for their gracious welcome.

You write, we listen

I personally answer all the e-mails received by GMtee and I enjoy doing it very much. Our customers are often really enthusiastic and it's heartwarming to know that we are appreciated!

Jay from California sent me several e-mails last week. In particular he wants GMtee to extend our size range to include 3XL. He's the third person in as many weeks to make this request. Fred in Ohio and Dan in Pennsylvania are also having trouble squeezing into their XXL shirts. So I think we should do as they suggest for our next collection.

Jay also sent me some interesting pictures of coins and other Asian objects.

Perhaps we'll introduce a button based on the coin. I don't recognise the objects in the second picture, but they could make cool hang tags. Thanks Jay!

Good and Bad at Shopping.com

We think Shopping.com is a great place to advertise and we've been drawing traffic from there for a couple of years.

The Shopping.com website is pretty much what you would expect from a shopping site. It looks a lot like Amazon or eBay with categorised pages of product listings and various search methods. The difference is that no transactions take place at the Shopping.com website. Listings link to an external website page specified by the advertiser (ideally the page where you can buy the product) and the advertiser is charged per click.

Initially it can be quite laborious to construct a datafeed of product details, but once that is mastered it is very simple to run a continuous campaign. We've been bidding the minimum $0.20 per click in the clothing category and receiving a steady stream of traffic.

Each product is separately listed with a searchable title and description. Each has a product photo, price, reviews and information about the seller's reputation. This means that a shopper has a lot of information about the product before clicking.

Shopping.com listings rank well in the search engines and are distributed to a number of affiliated shopping sites. If one wanted to get fast search engine ranking for a new site, it would be a great place to advertise.

I must confess that I have only just installed the code snippet which allows us to track sales conversions from their traffic. I've also installed the code that invites buyers to review GMtee (Shopping.com sends the buyer an e-mail a specified number of days after the transaction) and that will allow us to build a reputation. Now that this code is in place, I'm increasing our bids to a maximum of US$0.25. I'll let you know results in a month or two.

Now for two words of criticism: customer service! When the new GMtee website went live, I had to upload a revised datafeed. There was a problem processing the feed which resulted in many listings displaying half a photo, or no photo at all. Also they were still listing products that had been removed from the new datafeed.

I sent them an e-mail asking for help. Their performance pledge is to reply within seven working days, which seems about five days too many to me! We eventually received a form reply advising us to check our datafeed. I wrote back to assure them that our feed had no errors. Another week-and-a-half passed without reply.

I sent a third desperate plea for assistance and received a reply this morning. They say they've fixed the problem and that everything should be OK sometime in the next couple of days. Even if the problem is solved now, it's taken a month to communicate and that's just too long.

About Pay Per Click PPC Advertising

Following the redesign of the GMtee website and the release of our new collection, my focus has been on increasing traffic.

Traffic is not free and the bottom line is that a successful website must make a profit greater than the cost of it's traffic. In the jargon it's called "return on investment" or ROI. Ultimately internet marketing is all about generating "positive ROI" and getting the biggest bang for your buck.

If you spend $100 on traffic and make $50 in profit, you're on the road to ruin. A large company with deep pockets might sustain a negative ROI as a strategy to acquire long term repeat customers, but I would prefer to at least break even!

However, if you spend $100 on traffic and make a profit of $150, truly you have attained marketing nirvana. You can quickly increase your spending on advertising and watch your business blossom. It's not difficult to get traffic to a website, if you can afford it.

The most immediate and direct source of traffic is pay-per-click advertising. For example, GMtee advertises with Google Adwords. A Google search returns both natural search results (in the main body of the page) and sponsored search results (in a column on the right and sometimes also at the top of the page). With our Adwords account we bid against other advertisers to have our ads shown on search results for our specified keywords.

When somebody clicks on our ad they are taken to our home page and we pay a fee to Adwords. The cost per click varies for different keywords and we currently pay an average cost per click of US$0.24. If we bid higher for the most popular keywords our traffic would increase and so would our average cost per click.

It would be easy to write an ad to generate traffic. If GMtee advertised "Everything free: Today only!" and paid for top placement, I'm confident we'd have plenty of visitors. But the object of the exercise is not just to generate traffic, it is to generate qualified traffic. GMtee shirts are high-end so it would be wasteful to attract very price-conscious consumers. A good PPC ad accurately describes exactly what is on offer.

Our Most Popular Design

There's not enough pictures in this blog! Man cannot live on text alone.

This is our best-selling T-shirt (US$44.95 + $5.00 shipping) : Thunder Dragon long sleeve tee, crew neck.

A shirt like this is very expensive to manufacture. Because it's a very big print we must pay for very big films and very big screens. Thunder Dragon is printed in only one colour though, so that helps keep these costs down. Some GMtee shirts have five or six colours.

If we were manufacturing large numbers of shirts the cost of films and screens would be less significant per unit, but GMtee orders only a limited edition (usually 120) of each new design.

The most costly shirt in our new collection is the Japanese Castle shirt with long sleeves and henley collar. You wouldn't believe the manufacturing cost even if I told you. US$13.50.

More About Stumbleupon

A couple of weeks ago I started advertising GMtee at Stumbleupon. Here's my previous post about testing the appeal of our new site.

So far we've spent US$400. At $0.05 per click that's 8,000 unique visitors. Unfortunately we can't track conversions from Stumbleupon and I've seen no evidence that any of those visitors made a purchase. While it's possible that one or two sales resulted, I am sure that we came nowhere near recovering the cost of the traffic from direct sales.

Their campaign management interface is simple to use, but reports too little information about results. I had set up ten different campaigns with variations on age, gender and country. That is, GMtee home page was shown to either men or women in one of four countries: USA, Canada, UK or Australia.

Some campaigns were restricted to 18 - 55 year old Stumblers. These produced less traffic because Stumbleupon doesn't always know the age of it's members. Most traffic came from the US with only a small contribution from the other three countries.

I was disappointed that the ratio of "thumbs up" to "thumbs down" was not reported individually for each campaign. Instead the report showed only one overall approval rating (which held steady around 75%). I could have calculated individual campaign ratings from other information provided, but frankly it didn't seem to be worth the effort.

I had already concluded that our return on investment at Stumbleupon is unlikely ever to be positive. As a bonus though, I think that GMtee will continue to receive traffic even after we stop advertising, since it is in their own interest for Stumbleupon to include highly rated sites in their rotation. From time to time I will masquerade as an impartial stumbler and give the thumbs up to our own pages!

There's an intangible benefit from promoting GMtee to thousands of stumblers. Hopefully we are noticed by people who are also active on other social sites and it's possible that we could benefit from some viral networking. (That assumes you think GMtee is cool enough to tell your friends!)

Something odd happened. During the first few days of the campaign, GMtee was receiving between one and two thousand visits daily. Then the traffic dried up even though our budget had not been spent. I tried creating a new campaign in a different category (clothing instead of fashion), but it was not approved for some reason.

Next I created a new campaign in both categories, but this time pointing to our Men's T-shirts page. I restricted the traffic to men in the US. Almost 1,000 visits have been recorded and the approval rating by this group for this page is up to 85%. It's not a big sample, but woohoo! So now I've deposited another $100.

Webhost Rant

Some of you have been complaining that you can't access our site. I apologise for that.

We've been having problems with our webhost Jump Web Services They in turn are blaming the problems on the data centre.

Last night, around 1 am, I noticed that GMtee was down again. I fired off a terse e-mail to customer support and was pleasantly surprised that the problem was quickly fixed despite the ungodly hour. But when I returned to my computer in the morning the site was unavailable again.

Selling you a shirt ain't as simple as it might seem. Design, manufacture, delivery, photography, website updates, marketing... all that effort and finally our webhost can't keep their server working.

Imagine my frustration! Customers complaining. Lost sales. Damage to our reputation. Money spent advertising a dead site. Negative impact on our search ranking. Not cool.

It's expensive and inconvenient to move the site to another webhost, but it looks like we may have no choice.

/End Rant.

Testing at StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a site where you can download a toolbar for websurfing. With each click, the StumbleUpon toolbar serves you up a webpage based on your interests and the recommendations of other stumblers.

You can rate each page "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" and Stumbleupon learns what you like.

Every sixth webpage is sponsored. That is, an advertiser has paid US$0.05 to Stumbleupon to show that page to you. That's where we come in.

As an advertiser we can see a report of how many people rated our site thumbs up or down. That's a marvellous test since it's a completely impartial rating of our site. Advertisers can target by gender, age, country and subject category.

A few months ago I advertised the old GMtee website to 2,000 people worldwide aged 18-55 and interested in fashion. A 58% majority gave us the thumbs up.

I just repeated the same test for our new website and I am pleased to report that we are now rated thumbs up by an enthusiastic 75%. That's pretty good, I think. Now I'm starting some new experiments with variations on gender and country.

If you are a stumbler and a fan of GMtee, take a moment to give us the thumbs up!

...And In With The New!

It's up! The new GMtee website is live!

Out With The Old...

It's a big day at GMtee. Our old site is gone forever.

Later today you'll see a new site with a new look and a new collection. (Yes, the word "new" features in our marketing plans.) New shirts with new designs, new styles, new fits, a new direction.

I will have much to write about here and I might even have a few readers in future. I'll be reporting on our advertising efforts and results, both for the new website and this blog. Our marketing has been very minimal in recent months but now we will be spending some advertising dollars at Stumbleupon, Shopping.com and Facebook for instance. More about that later.

We'll operate the new site quietly for a few days to check that it's working properly and then build up our marketing into the new year. It should be an exciting time for GMtee.

For now, it's out with the old...

Dear Departed Design Game

In a sombre ceremony this morning we paid our last respects to the GMtee Design Game May it rest in peace.

The Design Game served us well for many years. Every week we displayed twelve draft shirt designs and asked players to vote for two. Any player who correctly selected the two most popular designs that week won a US$20.00 credit for their next purchase. Hundreds of people played and won. Many players were Canadian, due to the promotion of our game at a popular Canadian website devoted to winning free stuff.

The results of the game helped us decide which designs were most likely to be successful. And it gave our customers a chance to influence our creative direction.

But by this time next week you will see our new and improved GMtee website. As we soar onwards and upwards, sometimes painful decisions have to be made about what to leave behind. The ruthless hand of the editor sweeps out the old and brings in the new. Fashion demands constant renewal!

As we mourn the passing of the Design Game, we eagerly anticipate the rebirth of GMtee. Coming soon to a blog near you.

It's later than you think!

Hark! The herald angels sing,
Soon it will be last mailing!


The season of giving is almost upon us and it's time to alert you to the last mailing days for Christmas from Hong Kong. According to the wonderfully efficient Hongkong Post, airmail packages must be mailed before these dates if they are to reach their destinations before the holidays:


8.12.2007 UK
10.12.2007 USA
11.12.2007 Canada
12.12.2007 Australia, New Zealand
14.12.2007 Singapore, France
15.12.2007 Netherlands, Spain


GMtee sends out packages by express airmail, not ordinary airmail, so that would improve delivery time by a day or two. If you are willing to pay a much higher shipping charge, we can send your purchase by international courier which guarantees delivery in four working days (e-mail us for these rates).


Please don't leave your Christmas shopping to the last minute. Take care of it now. You know it makes sense!

Top Ten Inspirational Asian Quotes

Here's my top ten inspirational Asian quotes:

1) Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

2) Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles.

3) Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.

4) Sow much, reap much; sow little, reap little.

5) He who sacrifices his conscience to ambition burns a picture to obtain the ashes.

6) Everything has beauty but not everyone sees it.

7) The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.

8) If we don’t change the direction we are going, we are likely to end up where we are heading.

9) He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.

10) Mastering others requires force; Mastering the self requires enlightenment.

I wonder if you have any others that you would add? Which is your favourite?

The GMtee philosophy

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and GMtee took it’s first step in May 2003. We have come a long way and we know that the journey to come is much longer still. We’re building Asia’s next great fashion brand!

GMtee found inspiration in our hometown of Hong Kong, this sophisticated and vibrant East-meets-West city in the Pearl River estuary of southern China. We make “Inspirational Asian Fashion” that aims to bring a taste of ancient eastern cultures to the west.

The fashion comes first. Our shirts are beautiful and manufactured to the very highest standards. But it’s the Asian inspiration that makes each limited edition GMtee so unique and meaningful.

Despite Hong Kong’s breathtaking modernity, Confucian values still underpin our society and guide our philosophy at GMtee. We live by Confucius’ sage advice: “Do not impose on others what you do not desire for yourself.”

Many thousands of inspired fashionistas have GMtee shirts in their wardrobes and we are forever grateful to the loyal customers who have journeyed with us this far. We wouldn’t have made it without you.

Celestial's heavenly Asian dub

Click on the Play Music link at GMtee home page to treat your ears to the mystical sounds of Asian dub by Celestial. Celestial has released four albums since 1992, the latest of which is "Electric Road".

Celestial is a Hong Kong based collective led by our friend Pete. He describes the music as "a laid-back mix of Asian sounds over an empyreal electronic dubscape".

Here's what the music press has to say:

Asia's "answer to Massive Attack".

"...a kind of aural Shangri-La."

"...like taking a mini-vacation to faraway and exotic destinations, and having samples of every great song rolled into one...Irish...Thai...Nepalese with reggae B-side dub rhythms and blended with sitars, erhus and even harmonicas! If you're a fan of dub then you'll love Celestial..."

Well, we love Celestial so much that we designed a special edition T-shirt to celebrate the release of their third album, Hong Kong Dub Station.

G.O.D. busted for triad T-shirts!

The South China Morning Post (Nov. 2nd) leads with the story of Hong Kong police busting local lifestyle chain G.O.D (Goods Of Desire) for selling T-shirts emblazoned with the Chinese characters for 14K.


The problem is that the 14K is a major triad society. Anyone found in possession of any symbol relating to a triad breaks Hong Kong law.


You can't buy publicity like that! Perhaps GMtee should design something special for the Wo Shing Wo or Sun Yee On.


We already have one shirt inspired by the tattoos of Tokyo street gangs, our Tokyo Tribes T-shirt.

Perhaps we should turn ourselves in to the authorities in a similar blaze of publicity!

The three greatest eBay feedbacks ever

If you have ever bought or sold at eBay, you will be familiar with their feedback system.

Feedback comments can be a wonderful source of entertainment. If you have several days to spare, you should read this long-running thread from the eBay Feedback discussion board.


For me there are three stand-out classics. Here they are in no particular order:



Neg left by Buyer: Very Bad, Sick Seller! No credit and raise S/H after the end of bidding!

Reply by Seller: TotalPsycho!EmailedMePicturesOfDeadBabiesinSoup!Reported2AmnestyIntl SO SCARY!


This one was left for a seller who sells teeth-whitening trays and gel:

Neg left by Buyer: how do you expect me to endure the pain of trimming my own gumlines!!

Reply by Seller: HHEELLLLOO!! Trim the TRAYS to the gumline... NOT YOUR OWN GUMS!!! WOW!!!!!!!!

This third one I'm paraphrasing from memory, since I can find no trace of the original feedback:

Pos left by buyer: Great service, fast shipping, cool item. Very pleased, highly recommended!

Reply by seller: Yes, but don't plug it in or KA-PHUCKING-BOOM!!!

And finally, here's the infamous eBay kettle photo. Look closely. Eeeeewwwwwww!

GMtee Babe of the Month

October's GMtee Babe of the Month is a Virginian!

A few weeks ago, we invited you to send us your photographs wearing your GMtee shirt. We were thinking of starting a gallery. We'd love it if you sent us your pics.

Scott Murray of Harrisonburg, Virginia ("The Friendly City"), who recently bought our Red Tiger T-shirt and Tao T-shirt, overcame his shyness to send us this:

Scott says "Here's a picture of me in my GMtee getting ready to perform an evening of acoustic music in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia!"

I replied to ask permission to use the image here and assured Scott that we would protect his privacy. But happily it turns out that Scott is not seeking a life of anonymity.

"Babe of the month!!! I am truly honored!! You can certainly use my name if you'd like. (Scott Christopher Murray) I received a grammy nomination back in 2000 for "contemporary folk album of the year" and they can find my music just by doing a search on my name.

I'm just tickled pink to be GMtee Babe of the Month!!"

Thanks Scott :)