I have been wanting to add bike related gift items, like t-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, etc. to the about-bicycles site for quite a while now but have never had the time to make the arrangements.

Since there are already plenty of these types of things available on the Internet, I thought that it would be nice if there were gift items related specifically to Chicago area bike trails, since this website has such a large selection of Chicago area bike trail pages, photos, videos, etc.

Well, it hasn’t been the best riding weather, here in the Chicago area, so I did some searching and just found a quick and easy way to design and make these items available.

Keep in mind that I am rarely on the leading edge of technology and by the time I discover something, it is probably already popular with most people. Anyway, I just discovered the Zazzle.com website, which allows you to design and sell (or buy) your own gift items.

Well, I just designed my first t-shirt and have made it available for purchase on Zazzle. I decided to start simple, just to see how it works and selected the Fox River Bike Trail to start with, since it is such a popular trail in this area (and I could not find any FRT related items already available with my Google searches).

It turns out that it is a little time consuming, especially if you want something that looks pretty nice, but I was able to get a t-shirt designed, with an existing FRT photo, in a relatively short amount of time.

I think that this might have some potential to provide Chicago area bike trail related gift items to people that might want them (if there are people out there looking. Who knows?). The items get a little expensive because Zazzle sets the base price, which is kind of high, and then I add a very small percentage (royalty they call it) for putting the design together.  This provides a nice way to see if there is any demand for this kind of thing and if there is, I could see about producing the items on my own and for a (hopefully) much lower cost.

I hope to be adding quite a few more gift items out there, with different bike trails as the primary theme soon and I’ll probably post updates here when I do.

So just for starters, I have added the new FRT t-shirt to the following pages if you would like to see what this is all about:

The Fox River Trail North, The Fox River Trail South (see the bottom of each page for the new t-shirt)

The Zazzle site can also be handy for just creating your own, very customized items, as you choose.