Once upon a time if you wanted to produce your own individual range of clothing, you had to acquire premises, buy stock to fill the shop, entice people to come into the aforementioned store etc, essentially it was a VERY long and sometimes rather complicated and not always lucrative process. Then along came that nifty little invention from Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his boys in white coats (see its not just all about clothes here its educational) the information superhighway ! And Bob’s your uncle ! it’s made the complete process a whole lot easier to do.

We already have household names like Asos, Boohoo and of course the cybertastic likes of Amazon that have never ever had a brick and mortar store and creeping up behind them there are brilliant websites like togsandclogs, Coggles, Oki-ni and Youngthread, but another one to add to that ever growing list is artprintmarket.co.uk. Art print market was borne out of the frustration of a couple of friends who wanted to sell their own digital designs on art print and T-shirts, but after numerous attempts over the years to create one offs, the general consensus was that the individual prints were very expensive & poor quality and the custom Ts were poor quality and ill style fit.

The guys have started a cooperative offering a collection of products by new designers or people trying their hand at designs round their ‘proper’ job. The design comes in, they can format it correctly and then put it up for sale, handling the sale and delivery, hey presto with an ever growing number of choices and designers coming on board. There is co-operative marketing and the more designers selling their wares results in more traffic for people to browse the site, so the more the merrier! Plus, and I know this is going to send a cold shiver down your spine but, for the guy who has everything there are some amazing gift ideas for that fast approaching, most wonderful time of the year!