I’m hoping for more breakthrough artists.
There are so many good artists submitting that the familiar names and styles get the most votes.
How about a ~Never Have I Ever~ (made the top three) Derby?!?
That’s just begging to get someone to create a fake account–and even if no one did, I suspect there would be a lot of accusations. They did an ‘anonymous’ derby a while back, and it was saddening to see the number of people who tried to copy cat the popular artists, as well as those who outed themselves on social media to still get votes.
To be honest, if you compare the ‘top’ artists from each year, there’s been steady turnover as new artists come in and do well, and some artists succeed and move on. It does take about a year to get printed–though there are exceptions, of course.
Yep. Though weren’t some of the entries done “in the style of ____” kind of their experiment with the voters? It was well in an era of accusations, still.
It’ll definitely be interesting to see how the artists/customer preferences have trended over the past 7 years here.
As for exceptions, The Binge/TJost is coming up on Nevermore/haxrox in longest-continuous-streak-in-the-reckoning (272); third place is 190 weeks.
Think that was a different derby, theme was new take on a past derby winner. There was one that didn’t show the artist name during the derby and it was a mess.
A quick look at the submission trends is pretty telling as well. The vast majority of artists submit less than 10 times, with about 80 artists submitting more than 100. That’s a pretty big disparity. Would be interesting to see an overlay on submissions/year with a drillthrough for prints.
The votes are awfully low considering voting ends tomorrow. If this system remains and this kind of voting keeps up, eep.
One thought (among other thoughts) is that it’ll be even easier for those with giant fanbases to win - if even a fraction of followers/loyal voters throw a vote, they’ve got a huge leg up when the voting numbers of those closest to the fog are in the 40s with less than 24 hours to go…
I agree with ya! It’d be harder for us newbies.
A very valid point. We’ll have to see how the vote counts end up come Sunday …
Votes don’t necessarily equal sales. A participant may get 1,000 votes, but only 2 sales. Woot then has all these awesome entries from artists who do not campaign that they don’t print. I think it’s a strategic move, a way to cycle the artists, possibly get some winning entries that actually sell. Just a theory!
Many of us old-timers are well aware that votes don’t correlate to sales, as we’ve had multiple shirts undersell its vote count before (though not to that extent). On the corollary, we’ve had 30th place Editor’s Choices outlast and outsell all the designs from both its original and the double-take derbies.
So far, the vote counts are the lowest ever, which actually makes it worse because there are fewer regular voters to counter the fanbase auto-voters.
Alas, without Woot improving itself and the base product (aka the QC, the CS, and the blanks), I’m not sure what will bring back a higher voting base … because it seems that a lot of the old voters went here.
Yikes! I can’t believe you posted that link here. lol
i wonder how much overlap there is between voters for the apron derby and voters for the baked goods derby. fer example, if you add up the 10th place votes for both derbies, i suspect you mite get a sum close to what 10th place used to get in single-derby weeks (prolly a teeny bit moar, since there’s gotta be some overlap, especially with designers who entered both). did splitting the week into two derbies just split the votes into two different bins?
Why? Yeah, he’s competition now, and their shirts have been outselling many of the ones here in the past year, and they have QC, and responsive CS that I haven’t had to use for a year and a half now … but over the years, Ramy has brought in well over $4-million in revenues to shirt.woot and his designs still sells, so Woot has to be nice.
Is there some reason that only your short-sleeved tees come in men’s 3X? The hoodies, sweatshirts, long-sleeved tees, etc stop at 2X.