Posting more photos of customers wearing our products was always a goal and a challenge. We found that after we made a sale, it was often difficult to keep the customer engaged with us enough to send reviews and photos. One idea that worked was to occasionally offer free products to Warhawks willing to stop in and model for us. This post was scheduled a few weeks before Mother's Day, so we would have photos to promote our Warhawk Mom products.

Ever since the beginning of the Custom Shop, one of our goals was to be a creative space. We held annual t-shirt design contests in the spring and invited our social media audience to vote on the winning design, which would be printed and sold in the store.

One recurring theme over years of experimentation was that we could usually get engagement from the students when we were offering free products. For this giveaway, we made a collaborative post with the Bookstore and asked students to follow both pages to earn a giveaway entry. We received 284 entries and greater engagement on both pages!

An early concept I had for the Custom Shop was to lean into our unique ability to personalize items. Because of our method of Direct-to-Film printing, changing a word or name on a shirt was as easy as exporting an art board from Illustrator. Although we didn’t get much engagement with this particular Valentine design, we found successful applications of this idea when we later made the Warhawk Family Catalog and Sports Catalog. Suddenly, customers could purchase a branded UWW design for essentially anyone in their lives, and all we had to do was press “print!”

The Custom Shop’s branding was meant to match the rest of the Bookstore, with shades of purple and a comforting, supportive aura, but leaning a bit sillier at times. To play off of my department’s creative capabilities, I liked to make posts where shirts were illustrated in unexpected places, for example flying on a kite string or being worn by an animal.

Working in the University Center as a graphic design student taught me the importance of posting updated hours whenever the seasons changed or I took a vacation!

The Custom Shop boasts a 4.9 on Google Reviews, and we found that sometimes posting these testimonials would build trust and interaction. These kinds of posts were also quick to make: great for staying relevant while I was too busy with a large order to launch a new campaign!

I always thought we had untapped potential when it came time for holiday gifts, so this was something that I tried to push whenever possible. As a creative person, I have made my mom all kinds of t-shirts featuring her pets and favorite things, but with most of our target audience NOT being design majors, we weren’t utilized in this way as often as I expected.

However, this ended up being a decent thing in the long run, as we started getting larger and more time consuming group orders.

Trying to direct the flow of orders proved helpful for me, because I found that the shop would be quiet over school breaks and then extraordinarily busy when the student orgs began to meet again. Posting friendly reminders seemed to help repeat customers manage their time and spread out our tasks more comfortably.

A quick post that I made on my work anniversary/ the Custom Shop’s “birthday!” It’s worth noting that I also designed the signage pictured here.