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Using Spreadshirt

How to set up Spreadshirt on OrbitKit

Jeff Schnitzer avatar
Written by Jeff Schnitzer
Updated over a week ago

Products supported: All
โ€‹Title: Limited to 50 chars
โ€‹Description: Limited to 200 chars
โ€‹Tags: Each tag limited to 50 chars, maximum 25 tags
OrbitKit chops text at word boundaries.

Spreadshirt is a little weird because they have two completely separate systems for North America and Europe. These systems have different databases (including user accounts), so you must create separate venues & blueprints for each.

  • Spreadshirt North America includes USA, Canada, and (somehow) Australia.

  • Spreadshirt Europe is everything else (DE, FR, PL, etc)

If you are an English speaker and you want to set up a Spreadshirt Europe account, the easiest way is to visit spreadshirt.co.uk. Designs published there will be available on all of Spreadshirt's European sites. Spreadshirt will automatically translate your titles, descriptions, and tags to other languages.

Authentication

Spreadshirt uses the OrbitKit Airlock Chrome extension to connect your venue to your Spreadshirt account, just like Redbubble. Check out the Using Redbubble documentation if you need help.

Remember to check the "remember me" box when you log in to Spreadshirt!

For Spreadshirt EU, it doesn't matter which spreadshirt website (.co.uk, .de, .es, etc) you use. Airlock will figure out which one you are logged in with.

Blueprint setup instructions

Synchronization

OrbitKit can re-sync everything from the Blueprint, including royalty, product assortment, colors, and marketplace.

Multiple Languages

Spreadshirt supports multiple languages for each design. Your Spreadshirt account has a base locale (eg "German Austria" or de_AT) and all other locales are automatically translated. Auto translation is often less than optimal.

If you provide multiple languages for a design, OrbitKit will submit all of them. For example, if you create an exhibit at SpreadshirtEU for a design with English and German metadata, OrbitKit will submit the en_GB, en_IE, de_DE, de_AT and de_CH locales. All other locales will be autotranslated.

SpreadshirtNA and SpreadshirtEU support a slightly different set of locales but OrbitKit will submit each language for all of the appropriate locales for that platform. For example, French will be submitted to fr_CA on SpreadshirtNA and fr_FR, ย fr_BE, fr_CH on SpreadshirtEU.

You do not need to create multiple accounts on SpreadshirtEU to submit multiple languages (although you may). However, if you submit to a German Spreadshirt account, it's best to include German text for all of your designs. If you don't, you may see empty titles/descriptions/tags in your account until Spreadshirt's autotranslation kicks in (up to 12 hours).

Gotchas

  • Spreadshirt blocks text that contains "trademarks" just a bit too aggressively (eg 'ponytail' and 'ks'). OrbitKit filters many of these words out of your title, tags, and description, and this can sometimes produce peculiar phrasing in what gets uploaded. Other words (more clearly TM violations) will cause the exhibit to fail. Keep an eye on your retrying exhibits; they will succeed if you remove the offending word.

  • Spreadshirt recently started rejecting scaled designs.

  • Spreadshrt Europe is reputed to get even more organic traffic than Spreadshirt North America. Don't overlook it!

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