BarCamp T-shirts: Free or Pay?

[Dimitri Glazkov]

What are the common ideas/strategies for BarCamp t-shirts? What works?
What doesn't?

We are planning to get ours printed with the BarCampBirmingham logo,
and wondered if there's a wealth of expertise on the topic.

Any pointers? Vendors? Suggestions?

:DG<

[whurley]

For BarCampAustin we had a policy that any items like this (t-shirts,
badges, etc.) would:

1. be free of cost to all participants

and

2. would remain free of advertising on any kind

Personally I think this is the only way to go. Our t-shirts and badges
were a hit with attendees, gave people something to remember the
event, and kept things in the "free and open" spirit of barcamp.

It wasn't actually that hard to do. You just have to be upfront with
sponsors and let them know what the limitations of promoting their
company at BarCamp are. If they balk, then maybe they're not the right
sponsor for your event.

-whurley

--
whurley
whu...@gmail.com
http://www.whurley.com

[Christopher St John]

On 6/27/06, whurley <whu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

For BarCampDallas, the t-shirts were free of cost, but had sponsor
logos on the back. I didn't mind the logos.

Honestly, I would have been just as happy if people had to pay a
couple bucks for the t-shirts, since "free t-shirts" is probably not
a very good reason to attend a Bar Camp :-)

The tricky part was picking the size ranges. Amit had a good
rundown of the NYC choices, but we ended up skewing larger
for Dallas[1]

--
Christopher St. John
http://artofsystems.blogspot.com

[1] http://dallas.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2006/01/02/daily34.html

[nima dilmaghani]

It depends on how much money you get from sponsors.  For SF, we didnt get enough sponsors to pay for the t-shirts so we charged $10 each. 

[David Crow]

Nima's got it. We were lucky enough to have a lot of sponsors and were capable of providing the t-shirts for free, the trade off was that each sponsor expected their logo to be on the t-shirt, so we had shirts with 16 logos.

We also ran a $200 deficit (not including the stolen keg) and are selling new t-shirts to help cover the costs. No logos required. Lots of folks have chosen not to purchase these shirts.

Cheers,
David