I ordered a t-shirt from TeeSpring recently. It’s a HackerNews shirt. I wore it today as an undershirt, making myself feel like some sort of nerded out Superman, who could have ripped off my sweater at any moment to reveal my shirt and type a few lines of code.
I forgot the shirt came from TeeSpring. A week or so after I got it, they sent me an email with the subject line: Pop Bottles
That isn’t an image in the email. It’s an animated gif. If there is a direct road to my heart, it’s littered with animated gifs.
I write back to the email saying I’d open a lot more company emails if I knew they’d have animated gifs inside (including a Liz Lemon gif).
And this is where my universe explodes because companies rarely make my day like this. His only response was the animated gif below. Well done, TeeSpring. I’ve received 1,000 order complete/how’d we do emails, but this is the only I’ve kept.
No one else does this (Derek Sivers and CD Baby is a rare example), but maybe more companies should. Not necessarily gifs, though a company full of gifs was purchased for a billion recently, but delightfully surprise people once in a while.