You have to love the Eastern Europeans (*). Not quite as laissez-faire as the Chinese, but pesky things like intellectual property just aren’t a concern. I guess so many years being screwed by the Russians means a few ‘cease and desist’ letters are the least of their concerns!

So it is with bemused pride that I bring you the Polish equivalent of Madame Tussauds, figury-woskowe. Brought to you by the inestimable talents of 2designstudio, your local Polish amateur. The only thing saving this cowboy kid’s arse right now is his sense of humour - putting JPII next to a naked Pamela Anderson! Pure awesomeness…

(*) I do because I am one. I carry a Hungarian passport, even though I don’t speak the language. Thanks dad.

This month we welcome to the retail fold, miscelanea from Barcelona. After meeting Fátima at the OFFF conference in Lisbon, she kindly agreed to begin stocking our shirts. So if you’re in BCN over the summer, drop in and tell Fátima what an awesome decision she made ;)

The awards for our site just keep rolling in! Last week we won a website design award as well as a dope award… Big love again to Kamil our resident Flash guru now resident in our home town, Sydney.

Anybody going to the OFFF 2008 festival in Lisbon? Nice one centurion. We’ll see you there! If you want to hook up and talk about t-shirts, then get in touch - we love nothing more than talking about ourselves ;)

We finally got the backorder copy of the Boston Herald into the-hq and figured everyone not in Boston might like to check it out.

This week has been, quite simply, amazing. Firstly we’ve just been featured in the Boston Herald’s ‘Gotta Have It’ lifestyle section (image is currently somewhere over the Atlantic). Big shout out to Jed Gottlieb for pimping us Stateside.

And secondly, we had our first interview published in the über urban-cool format magazine’s Issue #39. Not quite sure about the Chardonnay quote, but if you’re interested in finding out a bit more about how/what we think, then head on over to format and check out the interview. Being up there with Dizee and Staple is not a bad effort at all for 6 months young, don’t you think?

Lost At E Minor, everyone’s favourite arts and culture portal, has just launched an online “shopisphere of intergalactic proportions”, and we are very proud to have been asked to be a part of the range of products on offer for launch.

Guess what? We’ve won the FWA!!!! If you don’t already know, its the premier global website award, and its a real honour - especially as we don’t quite have the same budget as a global car brand.

Thanks again to our resident Flash guru Kamil Gottwald for making it all happen. And if you’re in the position to give him work then please do, I can guarantee he’ll be amazing.

We’ve got the batch.02 shirts up on emptees, where we’re getting a lot of love for the site but not so much for the shirts. My personal opinion is that its because we’re consicously diverting from the ‘threadless aesthetic’ so prevalent on user-gen sites like this.

So good people, I’m asking you to do us a favour and head on over and give the shirts some love. Even better, get involved in the comments on each shirt. Nice one.

It’s been a wild and intense 6 months since we launched this affair. In that time, we’ve been boring countless people at dinner parties with tales of our exploits, as well as posting our tees off to exotic and unexpected destinations.

Tempers were frayed, sanity was threatened, calls from friends and concerned family members went unanswered and ignored. Many late nights, cups of tea and cigarettes later, we’ve arrived back from the printers with our second humble offering. Like that difficult-second-album, we deliberated, mused and mulled over the themes and artwork for an unnecessarily long time.

Continuing to turn to literature for inspiration, we took ideas from William Gibson’s techno-nerd-cyber-punk novel ‘Neuromancer’ as well as developing a rather clever interpretation of a quote by every MBA’s favourite intellectual, Niccolo Machiavelli.

Apple fanboys pony up, cause we’re officially the very first t-shirt brand with a mobile store, accessible through everyone’s favourite gadget. That’s right, our awesome Flash website is now available on the iPhone. That’s right fanboys, you heard right - FLASH ON THE IPHONE!

So how did we achieve this little bit of tech-magic I hear you ask? Well, to start you’re going to need the VNSea client released recently, and obviously have a VNSea server running on some other broadband computer. Oh, and its a tad on the slow side too. But hey, that’s the price for being on the cutting edge.

Thanks to Kamil, our resident Flash guru :)

Last week we were up at 5th Column with Spike printing our 3x new shirts. We’re calling these ‘batch.02′ and they’ll be dropping early feb, along with 2x hoodies in different colourways.

Its certainly been an interesting process the second-time around. With strong demand for the previous 2x designs, and Miniluv in general, we easily could’ve played it safe and released another Orwell ministry. In fact tonnes of crew keep telling us that’s what we should do next.

But we both felt that doing something different was what would be best for the brand. Now we’re not promising that we will (or we won’t) be releasing another ministry design in the future. It’s just that it didn’t feel like now was the right time. After all, there’d be nothing worse than being known as the guys “who do the Orwell shirts”.

So anyway enjoy these 2 teaser videos, where you’ll get a glimpse of the new designs. And as always, please let us know what you think in the comments below!!!

We’ve recently changed printers to 5th column. If you’re in London then you’ll probably already know them. If you’re not and you fancy getting some shirts printed in the UK I can highly recommend them.

They’ve been nothing but helpful, and best of all their quote came in substantially cheaper than our last printers, and without all the screaming :)