Shop of the Month: Interview with Jérôme Forest

This month we are excited to feature the winner of our 2024 Design Challenge, Jérôme Foret, as our Shop of the Month. Jérôme is based in Lyon, France, and has a passion for roller skating. Opening his Spreadshop rollerdisco has helped him to get the word out about roller skating in France, where the activity is not widely known. Learn more about what motivates Jérôme and get to know a bit about him with our little interview snippets.

Winning the 2024 Design Challenge

What is the inspiration behind your Spread Good Vibes design?

Competitions are an excellent way of creating artistic content under pressure. As one of the themes of the competition was good vibes, I immediately thought of roller skating. I also knew that I would have the support of my community.

What did the process of creating your design look like and which tool(s) did you use?

I started with a brainstorming session, listing various words related to the competition. The aim was to match the specifications as closely as possible to score as many points as possible for the connection to the theme. Then I built a mood board on Photoshop by googling several varieties of banana, roller skates, and so on. The hardest part for me was choosing the color palette (of course, it had to be yellow!).

Would you take part in another Spreadshop challenge again?

I entered the Pride competition (published in another shop), but unfortunately my design wasn’t one of the 20 selected (which are superb!).

Jérôme’s Designs

What are your 3 favorite or most successful designs?

These designs are classics:

1. Roller disco chick
2. Jpeux pas j’ai roller (quad)
3. Anatomy of a roller quad

How do you create your designs and what tools do you use?

I mainly create my designs in Illustrator because the bezier curves allow me to manipulate infinite paths. I’m very fond of one-line paths. The use of vectors is essential because they are non-destructive and pure, which means I don’t have to worry about alterations to the image when resizing.

What tips do you have for other partners to create unique designs?

One piece of advice that comes to mind when looking at competitors’ visuals is this: to create a unique design, if you’re using text, I think it’s a good idea to either write it yourself or modify the font used. That’s what I did for my design. Using a ready-made font with characters that repeat themselves is not interesting (although there are exceptions), especially if the font is stylized and plays a dominant role.

Jérôme’s products

What does your perfect range look like, and which products should people have in their shops?

In my opinion, the shop should absolutely contain classic T-shirts, a mug, a tote bag, and a sticker.

Which features of the products are most important to you?

The quality I value most is durability: a good mid-season T-shirt should be made from a tightly woven cotton.

Marketing approach

Where and on which platforms do you market your shop?

I got my community involved, particularly on Facebook and Instagram. Also, during my roller skate and roller disco sessions. I’m going to be running a lucky draw as well, to choose a winner from the people who voted for me. I also created a visual with a QR-code to encourage people to vote (when the page’s JavaScript wanted to load properly). 

What content do you create for your target audience to market your products?

I share content related to roller skating. That includes tutorials, stories, montages, visuals, videos, etc. 

Do you incorporate promotions to boost your sales, and if so, how?

I’ve never used promotions to boost my sales. To be honest, my shop is not the end-goal in itself and is not intended to make me rich.

Jérôme’s channels

We hope you enjoyed reading about what inspires Jérôme’s and the way he runs his shop, be sure to implement some of his tips in your own ways! Check out Jérôme’s Spreadshop as well as his other channels and winning design below.

Winning design: https://rollerdisco.myspreadshop.fr/
Website: https://www.rollerquad.fr/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Rollerquad.fr