It pleases us to please you by announcing that, henceforth and forthwith and furthermore, winners of our weekly design Derby will receive a larger first-day payment. Under the new structure we've applied to all of our shirt designs, Derby and commissioned alike, designers whose shirts sell from zero to 500 units on their first day will receive $250, while designs that sell 501 units or more will net their creators a $500 payoff. (Just so you know, we've never had a Derby-winning shirt sell less than 501 units.) The payment for shirts sold after the first day will remain unchanged at $2 per shirt.
We're going to apply the new pay to the winners of the Derby that ended this afternoon (#9, right? yeah, #9), so you can buy this weekend's shirts secure in the knowledge that the designers are pulling in mad scratch. Some of our best-selling artists have already pulled in more than $2,000 apiece, and that was under the lower-paid scheme.
As a great American thespian once said, "Mo' money! Mo' money! Mo' money!" If you're wondering whether you should put an extra ten minutes into your Derby submission, just picture those five Franklins smiling enigmatically from your wallet.
Now that we've gotten your attention, here's another slightly new wrinkle to the Derby, effective when Derby #10 launches tomorrow: you'll be able to withdraw your submissions within 24 hours of submitting them, or the closing of submissions, whichever comes first. A few of you have asked for the ability to edit your submissions, but we don't think that's fair to change an entry after people have voted for it. So if you notice something slightly off-kilter or unfinished or unintentionally pornographic in your design, just click the little red X to the top right of your entry on the Derby page, and you'll get a do-over. But you have to do within the first 24 hours, or by the submission deadline: if you submit a design 20 minutes before noon on Wednesday, you've got 20 minutes to withdraw it.
Will the extra gold in the pot lure new design leprechauns out of their hidey-holes? Will the red-X solution work, or somehow crash our servers and destroy our entire operation? Meet us at the Derby tomorrow at noon for the answers.
