Due to Covid and other factors, I missed the t-shirt campaign last year, and Teespring has closed the ordering information and told me I needed to contact the seller, is there any way to still put an order in, or am I out of luck?
Unfortunately, we don’t plan on resurrecting the sale of those two distros. Galactic shirts should come out soon. Edifice shirts are presently on sale.
OK, worth a shot, thanks.
Hi @Katherine_Scott, it would be great to be able to buy the previous T-shirts, is there a reason this is not possible? Thanks!
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ROS shirts usually get printed as a batch order. We’ve found that the “print on demand” places generally produce a lower quality product (e.g. ROS World). A permanent store could happen in the future but there are no plans for that at this time. Your best bet is to just check the website in May every year after the release.
Thanks, I was wondering if it was a philosophical question more than a logistics. I was thinking on the lines of using one of those web shops that you put the design there and they make the merchandising as one offs (for instance https://www.spri.ng).
Anyway, I suppose you could always get one printed yourself with the logo from artwork/distributions at master · ros-infrastructure/artwork · GitHub (though a vector version would always be better) (Maybe this could be a solution for you @shawnq8861 )
Thanks @martimorta I will look into that.
There is a level of philosophical reasons for doing it too. The tshirts are limited time and show that you were participating at that time. We did 10th anniversary reprints, but all the shirts were slightly different to differentiate them from the originals.
Note that we do use https://spri.ng which is the rebranding of https://teespring.com They started as a pure campaign mode, however they have adjusted to the on demand printing for simpler logistics for low quantity productions. However the on-demand printing looks decent on the first day, but doesn’t survive well.
If we order enough volume simultaneously they will invest in doing the screen prints and everyone gets better quality. Right now it’s unfortunately luck of the draw which production method they use, but we can bias it by ordering in batches.
For reference on the quality I have a small sample of my tshirts.
- Dome is ~6 months old print on demand in my regular rotation and has lost a large fraction of the design. For example you can barely recognize the open robotics logo.
- Kinetic is ~5 years old screen print in my regular rotation showing some cracks, but otherwise is solid despite being a moderately fragile design.
- Foxy left unworn print on demand (low contrast, muted colors, looks decent when not compared to the screen printing. )
- Foxy right unworn screen printing. Much better colors.
Teespring/spri.ng continues to be the best for worldwide availability but we are always interested in other options as the quality is so unpredictably variable. (ala I got two shirts one on demand one screen printed from the same campaign 
)
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Thanks for the explanation and the comparison, very illustrative!
@tfoote I understand the logistics, I was just pointing out that extenuating circumstances last year, specifically Covid, may have prevented some of us who usually participate from doing so.
