We want to make sure that Firefox t-shirts (and other Mozilla swag) are always readily available to community members around the world who want them. So, as we think about the future of the Mozilla Store it’s really important that we get ideas and input from as many people as possible.
If you have a minute, please take this short survey about the Mozilla Store. Your feedback will be a huge help!
You’ve probably been wondering what a Firefox product launch would look like if the story was told via t-shirt. Well, wonder no further…superintern Jeff Zeller is here to demonstrate:
As I wrote last week, the upcoming Firefox 3.5 release will be significantly faster than any previous version of Firefox. To spread the word about this achievement, we’re asking members of worldwide Mozilla community to share videos of their own speedy feats.
If you’d like to join the fun, here’s all you have to do:
1. Record a short video of you at your fastest. You can be playing piano, running laps or writing a blog post…just make it fast!
2. Visit www.fastestfirefox.com and follow the easy instructions on how to upload your video to us.
3. We’ll be editing the best submissions into a single compilation, so check back about a week after the 3.5 release. If we use your clip, you’ll get a Firefox 3.5 t-shirt (not to mention great karma and a story you can tell your grandchildren).
Need inspiration? Don’t miss the video from the incredible Steven Purugganan, who at the age of 11 already holds multiple world records for sport stacking. If you’re not familiar with sport stacking just watch the clip and all will be revealed (but you may need to watch it a few times because it truly goes by in a blur).
Can you keep up with Steven? Be sure to visit www.fastestfirefox.com and show us your speed!
Tara and I haven’t blogged about the Community Store much lately, but the inventory there just keeps quietly growing and growing: as of today it offers 114 different Mozilla-themed shirts for sale. That’s a pretty impressive number when you think about it!
Most of the new shirts (we had around 60 when we launched late last year) feature Firefox-inspired artwork contributed by our design community, but we’ve also seeded it with logos from other Mozilla projects, such as Camino, Bugzilla, Sunbird and SUMO. The idea is to be as participatory as possible, and to make sure the store has something for everyone.
So, if you’re planning on doing some shopping to round out your summer wardrobe, check out the selection in the Community Store (fashion experts are telling me that Mozilla shirts will be the hot beachwear item this year). And if you don’t see something you like, please add your own design!
Big thanks to everyone who’s contributed a design so far. Here are some of the recent ones:
Interestingly, both Mozilla and Microsoft unveiled new t-shirt initiatives last week, and although there are obviously more important things about each company than the way they sell shirts, the differences between the two stores say a lot about the way we each do business.
Microsoft’s new Softwear line launched with a fancy party and some retro 80’s-styled shirts created by hip hop star Common. Their store looks good and features a bunch of undoubtedly well-designed shirts, but the whole thing also feels pretty forced, in the way it usually does when a massive multinational corporation tries to show that it’s ‘down with the kids’.
On the other hand, we launched our Community Store with not much more than afewblogposts, and we just grabbed some folks from around the office to be the models. Instead of having celebrities create our shirts, we’ve put our brand in the hands of our community to see what they could come up with…the results certainly look good to me.
Surely a proliferation of stories in the media about how the “browser t-shirt wars” are heating up can’t be far behind…
If I know one thing about the Mozilla community it’s that people love t-shirts. So, I’m very excited about today’s launch of the Mozilla Community Store, which opens up our t-shirt creative process in some very cool ways.
Tara Shahian has all the details over on MusingT, but the gist of it is that now you don’t need to wait for us to produce a shirt you like. Instead, you can create you own design inspired by Firefox (or Thunderbird, Camino, etc) and upload it to the Store’s public gallery where you or anyone else can purchase it in a variety of different colors and shirt styles. Or, you can just browse through other people’s designs in the gallery – we already have 60 up there now and hope to have many more soon.
Looking at the bigger picture, this is a huge step towards Tara’s and my longer term goal of organizing and expanding the Mozilla visual design community. There are already plenty of people out there doing Firefox-related design – just look at the 3,500 people who participated in our t-shirt contest or all the fan art floating around the Web – but there’s also so much untapped potential just waiting to be harnessed. I’ll be blogging about our vision for this much more in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
The successful launch of the Community Store was due to a lot of people’s hard work over the last few months, but in particular I’d like to thank Ryan Doherty, Alex Buchanan and Mike Morgan from our amazing WebDev team (those guys can build anything), IT mastermind Aravind Gottipati, legal guru Catherine Brady, Stephen “Eagle Eye” Donner from QA and our PR goddess, Melissa Shapiro. And extra special props are due to Tara, who oversaw the entire process from start to finish (she did the visual design, too). When she and I originally had the idea for this store last spring we envisioned it as a fairly simple thing, but under her guidance it’s turned into something much bigger and cooler than I’d imagined. It’s very rewarding to work with such a talented group of people.
Lastly, as a bonus for you having slogged through this entire post, I should mention that there’s currently an introductory discount of 20% available…just enter coupon code MOZILLAMERCH at checkout (more details). Happy shopping!
A few weeks ago, Tara mentioned that we’re open-sourcing our t-shirt process in the form of the soon-to-be-live Mozilla Community Store. The basic concept is that anyone will be able to design a Mozilla t-shirt and both order it for themselves and make it publicly available for others to buy. I’ve always been impressed by our community’s creativity, so our hope is that over time we’ll build up quite a collection of designs.
We’ve already seeded the new store with 40+ of our favorite designs from last spring’s Firefox 3 t-shirt contest and our amazing Web Dev and QA teams are in the process of getting it ready for launch. Should be good.
The exact go-live date is still being determined, but in the meantime here are a couple of pictures for your enjoyment:
(Thanks to Bret, Ryan, Melissa, Juan and Amie for striking the poses, and to David for his expert photography skills.)
As anyone who’s spent much time around the Mozilla community knows, t-shirts are an incredibly important part of our culture. So, when Mary showed me a stack of classic shirts she’d collected from Mitchell, chofmann, Myk and others, I thought it would be fun to document all the Mozilla t-shirts throughout the years (with a few Netscape ones thrown in for historical context).
After some detective work, here are the 53 shirts I’ve collected so far (arranged in rough chronological order so you can see the progression):
If you want to see them up close, I’ve created a Flickr set of all the images. I’m quite sure that there are plenty of shirts I missed, so if you have one that’s not pictured here please let me know. I’d like this to be as comprehensive as possible.
This is sure to be a constantly evolving thing…I know of at least four new shirts currently in development that will have to be added soon. So, enjoy this little look back through Mozilla history and stay tuned for future updates.
So, if you can handle this sort of cuteness staring at you all day long, head over the Store and get yours while supplies last. Also, thanks to everyone who voted in the poll and commented on the bug for helping to make this happen.
(Quick background: “Firefox” is another name for the red panda, hence the connection.)
As Mozilla's Creative Director I work on Firefox branding, websites and other marketingish things. The intent of this blog is to cover all that and a little bit more.
