James Ready T-Shirt Contest Winners

A few years ago, James Ready had a humorous promotional ad campaign to promote its brand of beer.It was, no doubt, a spoof of the numerous competing beer companies that were including a free t-shirt in every case of their beer. The little-known brewing company out of Niagara Falls, Ontario was trying to draw attention to the fact that their premium brand, James Ready 5.5, was priced at a buck a beer, therefor relying on affordability rather than promo swag to sell there product. They called it The Invisible Shirt Summer Giveaway and it was obvious they were willing to let their beer and its price speak for themselves and that they also had a pretty good sense of humour.

James Ready Invisible Shirt Summer Giveaway

Now t-shirts are once again playing a role in a way for James Ready to get the word out about their brew, only this time the shirts are real (honest, they are).

Recently, James Ready opened its own gallery at T-Shirt Monster, a newcomer to the print-on-demand (POD) service industry, based in Oakville, Ontario. Currently, they have several humourous t-shirt designs and sayings from which to choose. However, in order to reach an even larger market, the brewing company decided to hold a contest in conjunction with T-Shirt Monster. The contest was open from April 2nd to June 30th. The rules were simple. Help James Ready spread the word by creating an original James Ready t-shirt and if your design was one of the top 100 submitted, they would send it to you, free of charge. They made it even easier for everybody by supplying T-Shirt Monster with access to their high resolution image and logo files in the clip art gallery. Of course, this lead to a lot of similar designs but the way to stand out was with a clever saying.

I decided I had nothing to lose by entering, but having only found out about T-Shirt Monster 5 days before the contest ended, I had to hurry. First though, I needed to check out, what kind of competition I was up against. I clicked on the contest gallery page and was surprised to see only 18 submissions to that point, despite the contest having been ongoing for almost two months. I attributed this to a couple reasons. One, T-Shirt Monster was not kicking in any prize money as they had on two previous occasions for contests they held, which was $1500 for each winner. Two, the newly-started POD is still not very well known so that means it doesn't have a lot of registered contributors compared to other well established PODs. It looked like they wouldn't even get 100 submissions.

It turns out I was right. By the time the contest reached its deadline, there were only sixty entries, 36 of which were mine. Yeah, I went a little crazy in those five days I had. At first I was only going to submit one design but I couldn't find anything in the rules that prohibited more than one entry being submitted by the same contributor. Inspired, I started brainstorming some ideas and got on a roll, ending on the 5th and last day with my 36th design.

And The Winners Are...
On Friday, July 18, the winners were announced and posted on the website. As I mentioned, the top 100 designs would receive as a prize, their t-shirt for free. Since there were only sixty designs in total, by default, all of those entrants will get their free t-shirt, including me and my 36 designs! This might not be the most financially rewarding contest I have ever entered but it was the most fun. Thank you to James Ready and T-Shirt Monster.

You can visit My T-Shirt Monster Gallery by clicking on the link.