My meme is slowly growing. I never wanted a big boom because I wouldn’t have been able to supply quickly enough to keep up with demand. At the beginning of the year we were basically stuck around 200 likes on Facebook. It had been months since we saw any dramatic growth. Once class started I began posting more regularly and trying to interact with my audience on a regular basis. This showed great results and we now have over 300 likes and still growing.

One strategy that worked very well was the contest we held throughout November. We posted a picture of the next design we were printing and asked our Facebook fans to share the post. After 2 weeks we randomly selected 2 people who had shared the post and they received a free shirt with the new design. This worked very well because we had people sharing posts in different areas than we normally would be able to reach. One of our winners was a former UMO student who transfered to Colorada this year. He shared the post in a completely different area and we reached likes from that area, therefore broadening our market.

Strategies didn’t work to well were the generic posts. The ones that didn’t really say anything. I think for people to get involved there needs to be substance to what you post. On twitter, I tried to be funnier and have things that people would either want their friends to see or something they related to and could easy retweet to get how they were feeling out there. I found that our audience is primarily based out of Maine so tweets about snow, cold, ect. were received better than tweets about buying our merchandise.

We recently purchased some new inventory. The LK Ski and Snowboarding shirts have come in. We got 48 shirts total, a full range of sizes and 2 separate colors. We have 24 blacks and 24 purples. I’m very excited about this design and I think our customers are going to really enjoy it!

See a picture of the design here

What started as a College project has bloomed into something so much more. My name is Nick Lee and I’m the President of Loose Krew Clothing. I take classes at the University Of Maine in Orono, Maine. My friend Cam Mitchell and I started our company as a class project. We are both New Media majors and have a passion for graphic design. With our love for design and a project to do we began drafting mock-ups of T-shirts we would be not only proud but excited to wear. We made designs that were unlike anything out there on the market today.

Our name came to us one day while we were busy making designs. It doesn’t have a crazy or meaningful story but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have meaning. We are building a brand, we want our customers to wear our shirts with a sense of meaning. We want people to feel like they’re a part of the crew, and not just any crew but more importantly the Loose Krew.

Creating tangible products is what you’re all about. We need money to print shirts, buy stickers, make hats, and pay for everything else that a business like this has to pay for. We are starting small but have big plans. Every little bit helps. Thanks for you donation.

Find the project here

I really liked the “Bright Eyes Kit – DIY LED glasses to inspire programming” on Kickstarter. It is a very simple idea that could really do a lot to create more of an interest in programming. It would be a very basic, step by step process that would yield a number of results (all depending on what the user programs). One draw back of programming right now is many people don’t know where to begin and this is a great way for them to start. It would be very basic techniques that would build interest in programming so the user would want to learn more and do bigger and better things.

The project is very well put together and the designers plan to keep it running smoothly is seemingly flawless. “All the code will be open source and freely available. We are working on easy to navigate and understandable tutorials for programming the glasses in various ways. You can create standalone graphics, animations, or generative visuals. By adding sensors, you can literally have the glasses respond to music, or if you’re really keen, you can connect them to your twitter account and share your tweets!”

Through the use of Facebook Insights on our page we are able to track what posts are most popular and therefore where to take our future designs. Some shirts are much more popular than others and people are more likely to talk about or share these designs than the less popular ones.

With my patient zero Matt Pellerin the best case scenario is Loose Krew takes off here on campus. The football guys all really like the design and wear the shirts often. Through them wearing the shirts, everyone on campus begins to recognize the Loose Krew as a brand and begins buying other merchandise. The brand grows and kids from other schools start buying merchandise and eventually the brand becomes a household name and everyone knows about it.

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