UPDATE – This vacancy has been filled by one unlucky candidate who should have known better. Thanks to all who applied! We have no vacancies at this time…

With much planned for 2012, we now have a paid position open to be the official Hipstery Order Packing Donkey. While not a position of glamour, you’ll be an essential cog in our small, disjointed business.  It will be based here in Berlin and be for nine hours a week, spread across either three mornings or evenings, increasing during times of sales & promotions.

Tasks:

- Covering customer service requests.
- Assembling standard products like our Hipster Kit.
- Analysing survey answers, selecting mystery shirts and packing orders.
- Handling returns and exchanges.

These are the requirements:

- Fluent Deutsch. Native is preferable.
- Freelance status (be able to invoice monthly for your time).
- Can work either early in the morning, or late in the evening. Flexible in increasing hours to respond to spikes in orders.
- Strong attention to detail.
- A willingness to embrace chaos.
- A passion for apparel and the ideology of the Hipstery.

Please send a CV and brief covering letter to salutations @ hipstery.com and be sure to include your required hourly wage. This position will start by the end of January if the right person is found. You can apply in either English or German. We are not looking interns at this time.

If this all sounds too good and you prefer a job of higher personal exploitation, may we recommend you consider our long standing vacancy for a Hipstery Scapegoat?

Update: Mens M, L and XL are sold out.

I have the honour of sourcing the cotton pleasure canvases that become your Hipstery shirts. It’s a job I take seriously and approach with the sort of manic zeal often demonstrated by the unsound of mind. I celebrate all my successes loudly and publicly, as one might expect. My failures, the shirts I order at 3am on a Tuesday morning, while inebriated, which when they arrive immediately cause both my retinas to shudder. Those, I put into a reject box hidden in a corner of the office, about which we do not speak. Until today.

Will you like them? We consider it possible, but perhaps not probable. Will you wear them outside the house? Possibly, but only for a bet. Can you return them if you don’t like them or they don’t fit? Oh no. Don’t even try it. All sales are final on this one.

We only have a small number of these shirts, so you are limited to one per order. Probably they won’t last long, we’ll deactivate the coupon code for that size when we’re sold out.

To order them, depending on which size you want, enter the correct coupon code:

For a Womens S shirt use coupon – “uglyshirtdayWS“,
For a Womens M shirt - “uglyshirtdayWM“,
For a Womens L shirt –  ”uglyshirtdayWL“,
For a Womens XL shirt - ”uglyshirtdayWXL“,
For a Mens S shirt - ”uglyshirtdayMS“,
SOLD OUT! For a Mens M shirt
SOLD OUT! For a Mens L shirt
SOLD OUT! For a Mens XL shirt

and you’ll see the reduction of €17. Making them €5 per shirt, plus shipping (assuming you order our €22 Just The Shirt). This lets our scientists know to only pick you something from our ugliest of outcast shirts.

If you’ve ordered before you can skip the survey if you don’t feel like repeating yourself, we’ll use your previous answers to guide us (colour preference may be over-ruled during this promo depending on stock levels).

Naturally you can’t use this discount to get any of our regular assortment of quite frankly, stunning shirts. Nor on gift vouchers.

Go get started!

Skip Willborough
Skip loves you. No seriously. He’s thought about it, deliberated long and hard – he really does. Admittedly he loves everyone, but that doesn’t make his love for you and less special, just maybe a touch less exclusive. You see, Skip is a nice guy. He believes in everyone. He talks regularly about “the global family”. He hugs trees. But not just trees, lamposts, parking wardens, squirrels, anyone who doesn’t run from his hugs will receive them. He wants to make the world a better place. Some have said he is overly idealistic.  If Skip wins this Hipstery election he is not really sure what he is going to do, but he’s certain it’ll be positive and people will like it, it will possibly involve hugging. Globally.

Vote for Skip by entering “skip” as a coupon code will save you €0,01 on your order, but ensures we’ll also add a quite possibly democracy related extra gift to your order.

Jackson  Templeton
Jackson also….well maybe not loves, but definitely likes you. Sometimes. When you stay out of his way at least. That is not say that Jackson is incapable of love, oh no, he just invests it carefully like a particularly prudent hedge fund manager. You demonstrate your ROI and he’ll love every inch of you. He is probably not very nice to the elderly. But if you get sued by a man who believes he the rightful owner of your Yorkshire Terrier, you’d probably call Jackson. If Jackson wins the election he will pass into law the 4 day work week.

Vote for Jackson by entering “jackson” as a coupon code saves you a flat €4 off your order. Who will win our election? We’ll keep you updated on Facebook as the votes roll in.

Ready to vote? Go mystery shopping….

Update: After early voting, Jackson is in the lead with approx 65% of the vote.

Okay, so it’s not actually Black Friday we reused the banner from last year and we don’t even feel slightly guilty about.

Yep, it’s back. Special promotion for one day and its triple propaganda pesos! Spread the word via your prop link this Friday and you’ll earn for every sale you refer – 600 Propaganda Pesos (worth €6) instead of the normal 200 (€2). But just if your friends and fans order this Friday (we’re flexible for those of you in differing timezones). They will save €2 as normal.

Get your link and some handy tools to spread it after logging in at http://hipstery.com/login. The three buttons shown at the bottom here, from your admin page make it fast and simple pimple to share your prop link via mail, facebook or twitter. Spread the word and get rewarded for your multiplicatory endeavours! We already pre-filled the options with some funny texts introducing our service.

Forgot your password? No problem you can also reset it from the login page by clicking this link:

It was a truly splendid afternoon spent reading and analysing all your answers to our 2nd year, so what now then? survey. Your enthusiasm and wisdom brighten even the dullest of afternoons in the Hipstery HQ.

Using random.org we selected two names at random to win a free Hipstery experience. One of these fine individuals is called Åsmund and comes from Norway, the other is called Ali and comes from Belgium. You guys will have mail shortly.

B) Results

Here are some of the results for your perusals:

We read the goal was to get over 40% Very Disappointed, which apparently suggests your business has legs and might do something with them beyond laying around on the couch. So good news there.

A broader split here, but still a general consensus in favour of more, and easy ways to regularly receive this “more”.

C) Open Responses

Here are some of our favourite answers to the optional, open question:

1. “Basically the hipstery is another word for perfection”

2. This one was in German, but the basic gist was that we should add larger – “Tit-friendly-t-shirts!”

3. “…it’s my birthday next week and if i could have offered my family the option to gift me a T that i could pick myself that would have been lovely. because, really, how well do they know me? i could get an inappropriate ‘T’ like i did when i was a callow youth and my granny thought i liked Scooby Do, but i really liked Desperate Dan and the Power Rangers, and i had to wear it and say it was nice, and was even told to write a thank you letter (sorry i didn’t always write Gran).”

4. “I kind of like you and stuff…”

The saddest news is that our planned mystery tin opener project is now halted after reading this one…

5. “I don’t think I’d be happy to fill in a survey and just get a random mystery object (Lucky dip bags are never what you hope for). What if you sent me a tin opener? I’ve already got two and I don’t even use them that much….I think mystery hand bag would really go down well, but you might need to girly up the site a bit. I don’t know if many women would be happy with men buying their clothes.”

Super to read someone noticed the message to the postie on our new packaging

“Oh yeah, and I though it was really cool of you to have printed on the postalpackage a message to the postaloffice dude/dudett, at the moment it was sent from Hipstery it started to become a gift for several people on it’s journey and I felt great that I’d “given” this cool little message to my local postman/lady, it propably smiled when delivering my mystery, and that thought makes me smile!”

So plenty to chew over from all the results and feedback. Thanks again for taking the time.

D) So now what then?

Going forward it’s still hard to know exactly what will come next. We’re still a very small business, a business in which none of us founders are actually paid a wage. We started it by cobbling together a laughably small investment since we’re all paupers, and only really got the business off the ground solely on kind, talented friends donating us their time and skills. Oh, and some begged and pilfered t-shirts. None of that is an excuse, just background info on why it has taken us a long time to bring out changes and new products/services. Honestly, we’ve already come a long way in terms of the number of shirts we have, in that we now actually have a custom built website (6 months work right there) with the backend wizardry that allows us to pack more and more orders each day, in that we have dedicated office space (the first six months we ran it from my sleeping chambers). Still, we often run into cash flow issues that inhibit what we can risk on new ideas and improvements.

In short, we can’t promise we’re going to get there soon, but however long it takes and whatever it looks like once we do make it, we hope that we’re still lucky enough to have such enthusiastic patrons as yourselves supporting us.

Q: What is this?

“The image of god, saying to us all “Those who are not with me, will become the leaders of the Coca Cola company and there lose all their respect, trust, loyalty, royalty, authenticity, they lose the will to live for anything else than money. They will choke on emotions. They will suffer in an infinite abyss of hate and rejection. For those who are not with me I will seals the sea of happiness with all my might. For those who are not with me, life will be nothing more than a miserable state of wallowing in the darkest of all feelings. But for those who are with me I will make life the purest of things. Those who are with me will be living life. Those who are with me will enjoy the most delightful emotion they have ever felt. Speak my tongue and bite my bread as from now on I will be your captain and pathfinder. The almighty Ekttiw. ”

Q. A genie appears. He grants you just one wish, what do you wish for?

“Happiness, not everlasting, but with the right amount of sadness to always quantify the happiness, and beig able to get through the sadness with the absolute knowlege that I will be happy again. I’d wish this for everyone.”

Q. There is room with you on your otherwise deserted island for one fictional person. Who gets your invite?

“I want someone smart, sexy and practical. And I still want Sex. As I am gay and I like bearded men I would love to have an attractive man with me. He should not be gay, that would be too simple and shortlived. He should be straight, that will give me and us more time: Ignorance, Despair, Curiousity, Sex, Guilt, Despair, Realization, much more Sex! And I want a macho – Okay, I want RUSSELL CROWE!”

Sometimes you read and answer though and you’re faith in the creativity of humanity decreases more that a little bit. You can only hang your head in shame. To illustrate this point I offer you exhibit A -

Anyway, here are the correct results

1 = Bjarni Bareleg

2 = The Hipstery Elf (a girl!)

3 = Mad Dog

4 = Budge Becher

5 = Rikard

6 = Me (Dr Willem). My interest in fashion began at an early age, with mostly – abuses of fashion. The motif on my shirt is Fido Dido which some of you older patrons may remember as the lovable mascot of the 7up company.

Obvious now huh? Bet you feel silly.

Winners, winners, winners – no-one got all 6. Two of you got 4/6, that was Fee and also Marina who won last weeks contest. Two wins in two weeks, well played Frau Marina. You both win 1000 prop points to redeem against a future order.

I don’t think there will be a FFF this week since it’s Easter and so we won’t be working on Friday or Monday. But we’ll be back next Friday with another instalment.

See all the original photo’s larger here

The contest – Tell us which team member is which photo.

A reminder, we have 6 team members

• Budge – Marketing (DE). Budge has two children of his own. Boys. They fight. Him mostly.
• Rikard – Graphics. Not only is Rikard a Graphic Designer, but his Dad is as well. They even work together sometimes.
• Bjarni – Finance and Back Office. Bjarni grew up in Scotland and England. But strongly denies the England part which he considered a nasty black mark on his otherwise pure heritage.
• Dr Willem – Shirt sourcing & Marketing (EN). Dr Willem was referred to as “the Milkman’s Son” growing up, on account of him not looking like the rest of his family.
• Hipstery Elf – Shirt Selection & PR. The Hipstery Elf grew up in Ireland and it’s long been said has the right voice for radio.
• Mad Dog – IT. As a child Mad Dog was a bully’s dream. Not only an IT nerd, he also rode the unicycle, studied magic and could juggle. I kid you not.

You can hunt for clues in the Meet the Team page. But bare in mind I wrote those descriptions and they are, um, exaggerations of the truth. All but one of the photo’s are also wrong.

Good luck! Enter as a comment here or on Facebook.

The point that I thought would give it away is at the 1 minute mark. The lyric “Don’t take money, don’t take fame, don’t need no credit card to ride this train” I thought that would be the lyric. Everyone knows those lyrics. We have all danced to those lyrics. Charaded they would still be instantly recognisable right? You would cackle with delight as our glorious hot dog flung away her credit card and popped her arm up and down mimicking a train from yesteryear. Too easy! Too easy you would say. Only you didn’t. Well, I’ll be damned.

Here is the video with sound.

Kicking yourself now huh. We’d also like to say a final thanks our Dancing Hotdog who is really a great sport. Oh and congrats to Martin Lundsvoll who got it right (well wrong band, right song, maybe he’s not as old as us and wasn’t around for the original. Either way, its correct). He wins 1000 prop points.

Stay tuned for another game on Friday and thanks to those of you who took guesses with this one.

Because on Friday I was very busy FFF has rolled lazily over into this fine Monday. Once again I have drawn upon the limitless pool of wisdom and expertise offered by those people at Fiverr. I hired a dancing hotdog.

Normally you can pick which song you want her to dance too, which is what I’ve done. The twist and infact the moment where the game comes in is that in this first video, there is no sound. Instead the hot dog acts out the song by way of mime, dancing mime, dancing hotdog mime! Like Charades. There is very little that can top that.

All you have to do is watch the video, pick up the Charade style clues, piece them all together and tell me which song it is. It is not easy, I recommend you write down all the words you think are given by the clues. Then free associate them until you find our song.

A hint – the song is a classic and you all will know it, but it is not very recent. No clues come until about 20 seconds in, no really good ones until 1 minute.

Once the contest is over I’ll upload the second music inclusive version. Answers here or on FB please.