Our clothing line has entered into round two of TeeMadness! We’re in a neck and neck race with another clothing company, and we need your help to advance to the next round! It only takes one second to vote, and two clicks!

All you have to do is click on this link, and then click on the green button next to our name which I have spot shadowed for you. Please help us avoid an EMBARRASSING second round elimination, and we’ll high five everyone and do everyone’s laundry. Mr. 51% has also been so kind to volunteer his singing talents via voicemail to anyone who can prove they voted for us, and told their friends.

Two years ago we launched with a small t-shirt store, (We only had 12 shirts) and virtually no clue what we were doing. Two years later and we’ve become a full fledged design/music/apparel resource with 30 products sold to every state in the US and 20+ countries.

It’s been great, and we wanted to say thanks by giving 25% off on everything in our store as well as free shipping on everything. No discount codes needed–and please share this with your friends and family, especially if they’ve been wanting to order shirts from us for awhile. (We’re sold out of alot of stuff quite often.)

Here’s to another two years–hopefully by then we’ll have our retail store in Chicago, a thriving video podcast of some sort, and millions of dollars and a stripper pole in our corporate offices.

Thanks to everyone who have helped us over the last two years

• Lex and Terry Morning Radio Network
• Phil and everyone at Woot!
• The Kaplowitz Family
• The Toomey Family
• Adam Hendle, and Beau from IATT.tv and IAmTheTrend.com
• Oswald Hobbes who makes me laugh and inspires me every day
• Tubbs! + future baby
• Dasimator (@quornball)
• Andy from Hide Your Arms
• ShirtsOnSale
• All the bands we sponsor and are friends/fans of (Dear Enemy, A Hero Named Hope, From The Broken, Seven Day Sonnet, The Swellers, Alkaline Trio, Rise Against, Invisible Gods, Trippy Wicked, Puddle of Mudd, The Delivery Boys, Motion City Soundtrack, Paramore, Radiofix, Direct Hit!, Anna Vogelzang, The Action Blast, The Fold and many many others)
• JumboG
• EddieFTW
• Rich Bellamy
• Ron Guerin
• Peter (Slashfilm) and Neil (Film School Rejects)
• The Emptees community
• Jud & the lovely Marietta from ShirtFight
• The guys from Cameesa
• Nick & Jon from Storenvy
• Chris Martin + Merchspin
• Jon Kruse from Shred
• Dane, Scott, Dennis – Photographers and professionally good looking male models extraordinaire
• John Staniforth, Fernando Rodriguez, & Candice Ciesla for their incredible design work
• Martin Atkins
• Chad Lehner + everyone at Total Assault

Help us spread the word!

Paste this code into your site to put our flyer in there (We know it’s large, that’s why we made 3 sizes!)

Large:

<p style=”text-align: center;”><a href=”http://www.assaultshirts.com” target=”_blank”><img title=”February Sale at Assault Shirts” src=”http://www.assault.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/february-sale.jpg” alt=”February Sale at Assault Shirts” width=”705″ height=”912″ /></a></p>

Smaller:

<p style=”text-align: left;”><a href=”http://www.assaultshirts.com” target=”_blank”><img title=”February Sale at Assault Shirts” src=”http://www.assault.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/february-sale-231×300.jpg” alt=”February Sale at Assault Shirts” width=”231″ height=”300″ /></a></p>

Our local friends in Chicago Cameesa have made a few significant updates to their cutting edge crowdfunding system. After adding as little as $10 bucks to your account you can start pledging towards the printing of any of the t-shirts added to the Cameesa pool of designs. As soon as one of them reaches the $500 threshold you get a shirt!

On top of that you get a percentage of sales of the shirt that you pledged your money towards after it reaches the threshold. It’s times like these that I wish I had some good ideas every once in awhile. So head on over to Cameesa and take advantage of their new features, and also their free shipping going on until March the 27th.

Jobby Monster

Darren let us know that he’s started his own gig called Regal Clothing. He’s got some great stuff including my favorite, the Jobby Monster.

It seems like most of the sites on the net are posting his Fingerprint ID shirt, but this one takes the cake for me.

Use the code IHEARTREGAL at checkout and you get 10% off!!

Fatal Justice T-Shirt

I must say I’ve spent almost zero time the past week doing any major site updates of any kind besides the When Every Sale Counts blog post and a few miscellaneous twitter posts.

I did however, finally move around our homepage to get a few more of you signed up for our monthly newsletter. It appears to be paying off at least a little bit since I’ve seen a slight increase in sign ups over the past few days. We were having some technical difficulties and for some reason people were able to sign up with invalid emails.

Here’s what’s been happening lately with Craig and myself at Assault

• Scoping out Black Friday deals – We haven’t had a special sale yet, but have one planned for a future date to corrrespond with a Shirt.Woot.com side deal of the day.
• Twitter friending and posting as often as we think of it
• Screen printing research – We’re working on doing some at home one color prints to see if we can do it at a feasible price point at home. Contact us if you’ve done this before.
• We’re now shipping our shirts for free! No order minimum required!
• Getting ready to release our December newsletter. Hopefully the unsubscribe link will work this time.
• Bought a 32in Emerson flat screen that I wrestled away from a crazy soccer mom–totally worth it.
• Re-ordered the Fatal Justice T-Shirts in both  black and white–get em while they last!
• Converted nearly our entire store’s javascript to JQuery. I love jquery.

Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter. We only sent it once a month and it always has the newest deals we are currently offering.

Mr. 51% has nominated himself to harness the power of Twitter to speak to you the people on a regular basis. If you’d like to follow us on twitter you can click on the graphic up to the right or surf over to http://twitter.com/assaultapparel and click on the follow button.

Craig will be signing up for messages to his phone so if you send a message to @assaultapparel it’ll goto Craig’s phone! How awesome is that!? Everyone send him a message at once now.

Assault shirts is FINALLY an official operating entity within Cook County IL. (plus we ship out of Dallas) Behold, a picture of me in my room aka Assault Headquarters holding our assumed name certificate (yet to be framed). You may remember my previous experience with the Cook County Chicago Business Registration Office… well I’m happy to say they came through and sent us our assumed name certificate!

We also have gotten our business cards printed (with a 10% off code written all over them). A tip to all you future business owners out there: use vistaprint.com to print your cards and do a web search for “Vista Print Coupons”. I got a 50% off coupon code that got us 500 business cards for only $9.99! The only negative thing to ordering from Vista Print is the fact that they try to upsell you on EVERYTHING IN THE BOOK. I, being the smart shopper that I am, passed by all the extra offers, but one did catch my eye:

I don’t know if you notice that, but they’re offering to sell me a digital copy of my business card for $1.99 so I can put it in OUTLOOK! How exciting! (of course it only works in outlook) I wonder if they realized that I uploaded a digital copy of my god damn business card already. Why the hell would I pay two bucks for you to give me my digital business card back to me to attach to my emails? Stupid Vista Print.

From now on everyone will be receiving business cards in their packages with a 10% off coupon code instead of Mr. 51%’s hand written personal notes. We’ve also made several improvements to the website based on feedback from our initial customers and visitors from Woot and OSCommerce.com forums. We’ve spread the site out a bit so that there can be 3 shirts per row on the homepage and a bit more space on the product descriptions, as well as optimized our site for search using some of the SEO tips for t-shirt websites post that I wrote a few days ago.

The other item we have added to the website is a Friends section. I don’t mean Myspace friends, but rather other clothing, t-shirt, and band websites of people that we’d consider our internet homies. If you write an article about us, or link to one of our shirts let us know and we’ll be happy to get you up in our friends section asap. Us small guys gotta stick together…