Liquid Blue
Liquid Blue is a company located in Lincoln, RI. The focus of their business is licensed screenprinted t-shirts, with an emphasis on colorful additive tie-dyes, but they also print a variety of other apparel (jackets, jerseys, caps) and accessories (keychains, stickers, incense, bean bears).
The majority of their designs are related to popular rock musicians -- starting with The Grateful Dead, whose designs they have been printing for at least as long as vbz.net has been doing business with them (1998). In subsequent years they substantially expanded those offerings to include Elvis Presley, Pink Floyd, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and others.
They also carry a large selection of nature, fantasy (especially dark fantasy, which The Mountain tends to shy away from), biker shirts (starting with Iron Cannibal a few years ago and adding West Coast Choppers more recently), and a few other categories.
Links
Issues
- Web site --Woozle 10:00, 13 Sep 2005 (EDT)
- Although the retail section has a search feature, LB has recently removed this ability from their wholesale section. This makes it much more time-consuming to find particular items, especially if you are trying to confirm that they are no longer available. In the past, simply typing in the catalog number would have sufficed; now you have to visually scan through the section in which you think the shirt belongs, and possibly other sections in case you are wrong about that.
- They have now added a shopping cart to the wholesale section, with a small discount for placing orders through it rather than by other means (phone, fax, mail, email). This is good. However, the ordering process is unnecessarily slow and tedious:
- Since you can't search for items, you have to browse through the various sections to find the items you want
- There really should be a bulk-entry capability, where you simply type in the catalog numbers of the items you want, and it adds them to your cart. (In cases where you don't know the proper size-suffix, you could simply type in the main catalog number to have all available sizes added, with the option of removing those you didn't want.) This would also allow for the ordering of non-displayed items such as the weed shirts.
- Also, the item listing no longer shows the price(s) for each item; you have to add them all to your cart (requiring an additional click per size, compared to the old method) and see what it charges you. In the past, you just clicked on the item thumbnail to get more information, including prices.
- Image Policy --Woozle 09:42, 3 Jun 2005 (CDT):
- 2005-09-13 Liquid Blue gave me permission to use the ftp images under the image policy as amended; details to follow.
- 2005-06-03 Since LB stopped providing images on CD, I have been downloading images from their web site -- which has worked well, as they always provide a "large" version of about 500 pixels square (which matches our "large" size nicely). However, just today I noticed a new policy (PDF) posted in their wholesale section which states, in part, that they don't want retailers to do this anymore. (That's bad.) They will, however, provide access to their "secure online image archive" for web or printing use. (That's good - an improvement.) They do specify, however, that retailers who wish to use these images must not alter or manipulate them in any way, including scaling. (That's a problem. I'm still in the process of finding out what the deal is, though, so maybe it's not as much of a problem as it sounds like.)
- 2005-06-03 Letter to Liquid Blue
