My application & the wrong cubicles

The Spreadshirt company offers small wanna-be designers, to upload their own vec­tor­ized design (vec­tor­ized means that it is not a picture, but a technical plan with coordin­ates, which could be turned into a picture — without blurry edges no matter how much you zoom it) and they print your shirt in perfect quality, even if you just want to have one shirt.

The most shirts you have in your closet are silk screened shirts, printed in almost the same way as a picture. But silk screening needs a custom-made screen for every color your design is made of — and you have to pay for the making of the screen before even a single shirt is printed. Spreadshirt’s way is clever, you are only limited by the amount of colors and detail-richness (no lines thinner than 3 mm), but most shirt designs are graphical illus­tra­tions anyway, so it’s not really a limitation.

What pisses me off

Spreadshirt started their business in germany and soon after they made some cash, they opended up the exact same company in the usa. That’s good you think. But they shoudn’t have cloned their german headquarter and send it’s twin to the usa: To outsource the printing and packaging process was all they needed to do — all the other stuff (their website, the customers webshops, the vec­tor­ized image checking by hand (they need to be checked in case of designer mistakes), the man­age­ment, the billing etc.) can be handled from germany. And by leaving that part of the process in germany, one could offer a designed and spreadshirt-approved shirt to the whole world. But no — now we have to upload our design to two different websites, manage our two shops on two different websites, and get our design approved two times by two different spread­shirt technicans.

You read that correct, the customer has to do everything twice, just because spread­shirt had too much money on their hands and doubled the amount of employed technicans.

Funny is, that their marketing strategy is “to be cool and hip and open­minded like the the young gen­er­a­tion”, and you think that they have a trans­par­ent business model and a trans­par­ent strategy. But when you ask them “why is that so, why do you make it so hard for me –twice” you get a “sorry, that’s not possible”, and when you offer your idea to them, you get a request to send in your fucking cur­ri­ciulum vitae and your school cer­ti­fic­ates! Are you inter­ested in cer­ti­fic­ates or in ideas? Do you sell cer­ti­fic­ates, or do you sell a great idea? SORRY, BUT WHAT THE FUCK? Don’t pretend your the young and open­minded gen­er­a­tion when you are too scared to listen to someone without a cer­ti­fic­ate that does not meet a uni­ver­sity degree. I don’t want to take over (i could, but i don’t know how to get venture money), so just fucking relax and open your eyes to what your customers ask or what someone recom­mends — at least think about it.

What happend earlier?

I send a link and a short explan­a­tion to the human res­sources dept. of Spreadshirt yesterday, saying that my article and my qualities might be of value for their business (and for me) — i guess it sounded to much like an applic­a­tion, but i was just hoping that someone with enough power would read it, and would finally change something for us, the users. I was just trying to solve my problem i have with their user-interface, as a trojan horse — from the inside.

What they replied

“Dear sir, you have to send us an ordinary applic­a­tion form, complete with ref­er­ences, cer­ti­fic­ates, diplomas and cur­riculum vitae”.

What i though after that reply

I mean, what the fuck? What kind of people are working there? Ordinary lame sec­ret­ar­ies, who have a cer­ti­fic­ated back­ground in bur­eau­cracy and short­sight? Who build their great business-idea? Who writes all the friendly news­let­ters and made their interface look like that i feel like i am a mate of everybody at their office already?

This is what i wrote back

“I do not under­stand why everything at spreadshirt.net sounds like we are mates already —  which sounds ok to me — and that you guys are relaxed folks, but when it comes to internal stuff, you suddenly change gears to “yes Sir” and make me a stranger, without even tipping the clutch.

All that stuff that you won’t find on my site, stuff you think-you-need to know me better (i.e. cer­ti­fic­ates, diplomas), is not important for my under­stand­ing of what i am and stand for, ergo you won’t find those things in an ordinary applic­a­tion by me either.

We could try to talk, in case a personal chat on the phone helps you “to get me”. I sure am a com­plic­ated person, in real life and in business — i don’t pretend to be slick — but i do have my qualities. Rules are there for a reason, but they can’t stand tall against all altern­at­ives hitting them.

My applictaion comes with the following ingredi­ences:
a) The art and kind how i com­mu­nic­ate with you (really, analyse it for a second)
b) My pro­fes­sional cricic in the article i wrote about you (that should be enough already)
c) The look and feel of my personal weblog
 – Are graphical and aes­thet­ical tasks my thing? Have a look — like it?
 – Is the interface and its layout/look a good choice, do i know the basics — or more?
 – Do i sound symphatic to you, or like a pissed off bully who happens to have a blog?

If that is not enough for you to decide who i am, then i don’t know how a school diploma could help you there, and if you really need that, then i guess you don’t recieve enough author­isa­tion to think further and ahead of ordinary applic­a­tions and that the human res­sources dept. missed a lot of potential candidates.

Finishline

If that is so (i still hope you just had a bad start today), then i am sorry to say that i am not inter­ested.
I didn’t really seek for a job, i just offered something.”