Intellectual Property Policy
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This page explains who owns what on teecrate.shop, what you may and may not do with our designs, how we keep other people’s characters, logos and names off our shirts, and how to report a trademark, character, design or publicity concern. It also covers the text you type for a personalised shirt, because a name on a birthday tee is the one part of a Tee Crate design that we do not draw ourselves. For copyright notices, the formal process is on our DMCA page.
At a glance
- The Tee Crate name, the crate-and-candle logo, our drawings, product descriptions and site text belong to Tee Crate.
- Every design we sell is original. No cartoon characters, no licensed characters, no brand logos, no sports team or school names.
- Personalisation fields are for names, ages, roles and party dates. We refuse text that uses someone else’s character, brand or team.
- You are welcome to share links to our pages. Please do not copy our designs, pictures or text.
- Report a concern to support@teecrate.shop with the subject “IP concern”. We reply within 24 hours on business days.
1. What belongs to Tee Crate
Everything you see on teecrate.shop was made for this store or is used with permission. That includes:
- the Tee Crate name and the logo of a wooden crate with a birthday candle sticking out of it;
- our birthday designs, such as the number candles from 1 to 10, the three scoops of ice cream, the four-alarm fire truck, the high-five hand, the double-digits paper banner, the halfway-to-one cake and the lucky seven design;
- the drawn pictures on our homepage, category pages and product pages, including the open crate, the family line-up and the candle shelf;
- product names, product descriptions, size help, page text and the way the site is laid out.
These are protected by copyright, trademark and other intellectual property laws. Owning a shirt gives you the shirt, not the right to reproduce the design on it.
2. What you may do
- Look at, print or save our pages for your own personal, non-commercial use, for example to share a size chart with a grandparent.
- Share links to our products and pages by message, email or social media.
- Post photos of your family wearing Tee Crate shirts on your own accounts. That is your photo and your party; you do not need our permission.
- Quote a short piece of our text with a link back to the page it came from.
3. What you may not do
- Copy, trace or redraw our designs to print on your own products or to sell anywhere, including marketplaces and print-on-demand stores.
- Reuse our product pictures, drawn bands or descriptions on another site.
- Use the Tee Crate name or logo, or something confusingly similar, in a way that suggests you are us or work with us.
- Download the site in bulk with automated tools. Normal search engine indexing is fine.
If you would like to use something in a way not listed above, ask first. We answer every request, and we say plainly if the answer is no.
3.1 Resellers and party planners
Party planners, daycares and relatives sometimes order many shirts at once for an event. That is welcome: you are buying shirts, and you can hand them out however you like. What you cannot do is buy one shirt and reprint its design, or list our designs in your own shop. If you want to offer Tee Crate shirts to your clients, email us first so we can talk about it honestly.
4. Our trademarks
Tee Crate and the crate-and-candle logo are our trademarks. Any other name you see on this site, for example a payment service at checkout, belongs to its owner, and showing it does not mean that owner endorses us.
5. How we keep other people’s rights off our shirts
Birthday shirts are a place where borrowed characters turn up all the time. We chose a different path. The owner rule for this store is simple: original designs only, with no logos, brands or characters that belong to someone else, and no cartoon characters at all. In practice that means:
- No characters. No characters from films, shows, games, books or toys, and none drawn “in the style of” one. Our animals and objects, such as the fire truck or the ice-cream scoops, are our own drawings and are not meant to look like any known character.
- No logos or brand names. No product brands, no toy brands, no restaurant or candy brands, not even as a joke.
- No teams or schools. No sports team names, league names, club colours presented as a team kit, college names or school names.
- No real people. No celebrities, players or public figures, and no likeness of anyone.
- Common words only. Our phrases are everyday birthday words, such as “birthday crew”, “big sister” or “double digits”. If you own a trademark in a phrase we use, tell us and we will look at it straight away.
6. Personalisation text
Three designs carry text that you type: the Name & Age Birthday Kid Tee, the Cake Smash Name Baby Bodysuit and the Sibling Name & Role Kids Tee. The fields are meant for a first name or nickname, an age, a role and, on the Name & Age tee, a party date. We never suggest or prefill a team, brand or character name.
6.1 Text we refuse
We will not print, and may cancel the order for, text that:
- is the name of a character, a brand, a product, a sports team, a league, a club or a school;
- is a slogan or catchphrase known to belong to a company or a show;
- is the name of a celebrity or public figure used to suggest they are involved;
- is hateful, rude or otherwise not suitable for a child’s birthday shirt.
If a child happens to share a first name with a famous character, that is fine. A name is a name. What we refuse is text that uses the character itself, for example a character’s full name together with a party theme built around it.
| You type | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A first name, such as Mila or Theo | Print it exactly as typed | A name is yours to use |
| A family nickname, such as Bug or Captain | Print it | Everyday words, nobody’s mark |
| A role, such as Big Sister or Cousin | Print it from the fixed list | Our own role options |
| A party date, such as June 14 | Print it on the back if you chose that add-on | A date belongs to no one |
| A character’s name plus its catchphrase | Email you before printing | That text belongs to the character’s owner |
| A team, school or brand name | Email you before printing | Owner rule: no team, school or brand names |
6.2 What happens if we refuse
If we spot such text before printing, we email you, explain the problem and offer two choices: change the text within a reasonable time, or cancel that shirt for a full refund. We do not print first and ask later. Because there is no proof step, we cannot show you a preview from our side; the live preview on the product page is only a guide to where your text goes. More about personalised orders is in our Terms of Service.
7. A party theme without borrowed characters
We know many kids have a favourite character, and a themed party is half the fun. You can still match a theme without putting someone else’s character on the shirt. A few ideas that work with our designs:
- Match the colours, not the character. Pick the shirt colour that fits the party palette, such as Balloon Blue for a sky-and-clouds party or Strawberry Pink for a berry party, and let the decorations carry the theme.
- Use the number. The number candle designs work for any theme because the age is the star.
- Theme by object. Ice cream, fire trucks, a high five and paper banners are themes in their own right, and our drawings of them are original.
- Give the grown-ups a job. Our In Charge Of party job tee lets the crew match without any character at all.
8. How a design gets into the store
Before a design is published, we check it against the rules in section 5: is every element drawn for us, is there any logo or lettering that belongs to someone else, does any part look like a known character? Product pictures are made for our own listings and show our own designs. If we ever work with an outside illustrator or picture maker, they must give us original work and the right to use it, and the same rules apply to them. If something slipped through anyway, the report process below is how you can help us fix it.
9. How to report an intellectual property concern
Email support@teecrate.shop with “IP concern” in the subject and include:
- Your name and contact details, and your relationship to the rights owner.
- The right you believe is affected, for example a trademark registration number and country, or a description of the character or design.
- The link to each product or page concerned, and which picture or text you mean.
- A short explanation of why you believe it infringes, and a statement that the information you give is accurate.
You may also write to Tee Crate, 11 Brookside Dr, Delmar, NY 12054, US. For copyright in a drawing, photo or text, please use the process on our DMCA page, which asks for a few extra statements.
10. What happens next
| Step | What we do |
|---|---|
| Acknowledge | We confirm we received your report within 24 hours on business days. |
| Review | We compare your right with the product, picture or text you pointed to, and ask for more information if we need it. |
| Act | If the concern is valid, we remove or change the product, stop new orders of it and tell you what we did. |
| Customers | Customers with open orders for an affected item are told, and we refund any order we cancel in full. |
We would rather take a design down for a few days while we check than leave a real problem online. If after review we believe the concern is not valid, we tell you why and put the product back.
11. Ideas and feedback
Parents and grandparents often send us ideas, such as a role we do not have yet or an age pun for an eight-year-old. We love reading them. If you send an idea, we may use it without paying for it, and we never publish your name or message without asking you first.
An idea we receive does not change the rules in section 5. If someone suggests a design built around a character or a brand, we will not make it, however popular it is. We would rather draw something new for the same age, such as a fresh pun for an eight-year-old, than borrow what belongs to someone else.
12. Permission requests and contact
To ask permission to use our content, or with any question about this policy, email support@teecrate.shop. Related pages: Terms of Service, DMCA, Privacy Policy and Contact Us.