I have received many comments for the Persian Phoenix design. While most of them are positive, there have been some that seem to suggest that the positive comments are fake.

Now being falsely accused of something makes me just as frustrated as the next guy, but looking at it from a more objective viewpoint I could see how some people could be surprised (and some pissed) by seeing 90 comments on someone's first submitted design after just 5 days. So I decided write a post explaining how I got those comments to erase all suspision. Of course there's those of you who have already made up your mind and are sure that those comments are fake. you can stop reading right now. For the rest, please read on.

I started designing shirts at the start of the 2006 Fifa World cup. Being a designer of Persian descent and having a semi-popular weblog (www.legofish.com), I decided to make some t-shirts for Iran's soccer fans. After seeing how those designs, and particularly the following Persian Lion design were well received, I decided to follow the trend by making more Persian-inspired designs.




I chose the Persian Phoenix as my next project, and this time I submitted the design to threadless.

While posting the design (and in Persian) on my blog with average daily readership of 700 was enough to divert a sizable portion of those readers here, I didn't just stop there.

I sent an email to my mailing list containing my friends asking for their support and vote.

I also actively promoted the design by asking other bloggers and webmasters of popular persian sites to feature the design on their sites and link to my entry on threadless.

Among the sites that featured my design were the hugely popular iranian.com (scroll down to see my design featured there) and the Persian radio radiozamaneh.com. It was also discussed on popular Persian forums and message boards, including iransportspress.com, persianfootball.com, and irankicks.com.

All that meant that the design was exposed to several thousand viewers. And not just any viewer, but a targetted audience that the design most appealed to. From those several thousand, less than a hundred really liked the design and chose to vote and comment on it. Of course they had to create a new account, hence the fact that most commenters have been new users of threadless.

So by promoting my design where it mattered, I managed to get the response that I did and also add to the pool of threadless users by introducing a whole new set of potential customers and community members who would otherwise not have known about this site.

I hope that answers some of the questions and suspisions that you might have. If you're still not convinced, you're more than welcome ot contact Threadless. I'm sure they have ways to spot users who infringe upon their rules and can track IP addresses and referred sites.