shop submission guidelines.

Hi, and welcome to our submission page. It’s long, but we tried to make it as entertaining as possible. (The smart ones among you will recognize this as a huge list of tips for improving your webshop.)

We review everyone from elegant boutiques to basement businesses. We don’t care how established you are if your work is good. We especially invite merchants and designers who are brand-new to the retail scene and need help getting the word out.

While we’re open to all aesthetics, we’re more inclined towards the dark and extreme – there are a bazillion “indie fashion” blogs out there and the weird stuff doesn’t have a whole lot of places to be oohed and aahed over. We especially welcome shops that don’t have a chance in hell at getting mentioned in a mainstream fashion magazine.

We’re constantly on the lookout for things our readers have never seen before, so the more unique your stuff is, the better. Each shop we review gets some time at the top of our front page, so we’re pretty particular about what gets shouted from our rooftop.

NOTE: We have gotten so overrun by Leg Avenue, Demonia, Shirley of Hollywood, Allure Leather, and Alchemy Gothic that we no longer accept sites that feature just these brands and nothing else.

ANOTHER NOTE: We are now accepting submissions from Etsy sellers! Scroll down for the details.

our criteria:

subcultural and/or independent fashion, design, and art only.

If you can find it in the mall or a high-end department store, we don’t want it. Please look at the shop categories in the sidebar to get an idea of what we cover.

no showroom sites.

Our readers must be able to place an order for the items on your site, not just look at pretty things with no way to buy them. Even if you don’t have a shopping cart, “contact for direct purchasing information” will suffice – although the lack of a shopping cart means you’d better be easy to contact.

no wholesale/manufacturing sites.

We want catalogs that can be accessed by all our readers, not just the ones with resale licenses or login codes. Also you must be selling items that can be bought straight from your site, not redirected to a stockist. And it bears repeating: we are not a shop, we are a blog. We are not interested in doing wholesale business with people who have obviously not read this paragraph.

decent amount of stuff.

• Sites that have only three or four items for sale have to have something really amazing to make up for a tiny stock. This goes double when the merch is “OOAK” or “reconstructed from vintage finds.”
• Sites that look like they’ve got categories full of merchandise but hit us with a lot of “No products in this category” pages will be deemed too annoying to review.

no fur.

We do not promote the selling of fur, especially now that the glam revival is making fur trim quite popular. This includes “faux” fur, which may not be as fake as we’re led to believe. While some of the sites we list may have fur or fake-fur items for sale, we don’t highlight them in our reviews.

a note on body jewelry.

When reviewing body jewelry sites that carry organic items, the first thing we look for is an info page on where the bone and horn are coming from. This goes triple for ivory. If there’s total silence on this, we’ll pass.

no post-70’s porn.

We do have a section for kitschy retro porn sites that charge membership fees, but anything eighties and on, no. Also, we’ll pass on sites that are using degrading language, or bundling up with other sites that do so.

no intangibles.

We only list physical goods – that means, no MP3’s, no webdesign, no over-the-net tarot readings or other services. Basically, nothing that can’t be packed in a box and shipped.

a note on secondhand.

Professionals selling antiques or vintage clothing are welcome to submit their sites. We do not list stuff that came out of your garage.

photographs.

• We need one picture of your merchandise we can use alongside your review. If your photos trigger warnings when right-clicked, submitting your site means you consent to our going ahead and taking one of them for publication. If your site shows the merch in Flash, send us a few .jpgs. For adult stores who don’t have any all-ages pics, send us an image of your logo.
• We don’t accept text-only catalogs – we can’t review what we can’t see.
• We must see actual photographs of merchandise, no movie stills or sketches.
• Items have to be photographed with professionalism in mind – no unintentionally blurred shots, no hands holding up the item, no items thrown on the floor, nothing that looks like a badly photographed auction.
• No crappy pixellated catalog scans, please.
• If your site has big fat watermarks splattered across the item where they can’t be cropped out, email us some clean images we can use for your thumbnail pic.
• Images have to be hosted on your site – no Yahoo, Photobucket, or Flickr galleries.
• Catalogs where it’s obvious other people’s images are being used without their permission are immediately disqualified from consideration.

webhosting & site design.

• Site design must work in multiple browsers. We use Mozilla Firefox, so keep that in mind if you’ve designed only for IE.
• We prefer individual domains, so sites that have prominent webhosting ads or dreadful popups really need to have outstanding merch to make up for it – and Google AdWords should not be the first thing that we see when clicking into your site. Sites that have annoying graphics butting into the catalog and voiceovers telling us we’ve “won” something will prompt us to surf away quickly.
• Sites that are too hard to navigate – such as offering a huge page of item links with no thumbnails, prompting a click on each one to see what’s behind it – will not be inflicted upon our readership.
• Check that you don’t have broken bits of code and HTML hanging out. Product descriptions should not have “fill in text here” as an accompaniment to the image.
• If you’re a retailer and the brands you carry are already well-covered in our directory, your site has to have a lot of personality to get listed. We don’t like sites that are sterile – no keywordy domain names or Googley layouts that look like doorway sites. Make it YOURS.

a note on SEO.

We’re well aware that everyone wants to get to the top of Google, and that’s fine. But repeating a keyword four times in one sentence and other obvious shady behavior will not speak well of your catalog.

a note on Etsy and BigCartel.

• Etsy sellers are invited to submit individual items for inclusion in our weekly Etsy Highlights feature.

Please be patient, there’s a waiting list that can go beyond 30 days. Also, if you’ve already gotten a Chateau review and can be found through our directory, we’ll pass – the Etsy feature is intended for sellers who don’t have their own domains, and we made it up specifically to include them in the Chateau.

• We will happily include BigCartel sellers the day they introduce a universal search field akin to Etsy or eBay, making it 1000x easier to find the good stuff. Until then, BC merchants are welcome to promote their wares in our LiveJournal community.

a note on eBay.

• If a merchant is using eBay as their primary storefront, the eBay address is listed. If a merchant has their own domain and they’re using eBay for getting the word out about the webstore, or selling off old stock, it’s folded into the listing with a separate eBay link.
• Merchants who sell their wares through auctions have to be making everything themselves, carry brand-new stock, or sell vintage clothing. You also have to have a significant amount of merch available for sale – you don’t have to have an official eBay store, but we don’t want our readers to hit empty pages when they click your link.
• We don’t list sellers with excessive amounts of bad feedback.
• We do not list individual eBay auctions.

a note on Cafe Press.

We don’t list Cafe Press shops, because anybody can have one, and since most of the money goes to them, doesn’t really qualify as a small business merchant.

a note on LiveJournal.

Selling through LiveJournal is a nice, laid-back way to get your work out, but it’s amateur. However, merchants who are selling through LJ are welcome to post in the Chateau’s community.

categorization.

Shops are tagged with the most direct descriptions of their designs to avoid keyword spamming and muddying the categories. Ex.: Victorian gowns can be quite gothic, but if there aren’t any designs that have the distinct Morticia stylings of bell sleeves or cobweb lace, then this isn’t a gothic shop. Long flowing medieval dresses could be bridal, but unless there are photographs of finished designs, “these can be ordered in white” doesn’t cut it. And “punk-inspired” does not automatically mean it’s punk.

“But! But! You already listed “____________!”

Sites that have broken any of the aforementioned rules are considered “grandfathered.” Live with it.

review revisions.

We are happy to take a look at your site if you’ve made drastic changes in your catalog and need to update an outdated listing. Drop a line, if so. We ask that you keep these requests to once a year, because 2000 merchants asking us for an update every time they get a couple of new items in will kill us.

when submitting your site:

• Tell us who you are, what you’re selling, whatever you feel necessary to present your wares. Despite the rather intimidating mountain of criteria we’ve amassed after years of reviewing catalogs, we love looking at fabulously outre creative things, and giving a boost to small-biz people while doing so. We aren’t some huge, impersonal entity you need to impress with fancy marketing speak or any crap like that – in fact, we’ve come to loathe fancy marketing speak because it all tends to sound the same – step up and give us your spiel!
• If you want to offer our readers a discount or free gift or other promotional goodie that doesn’t have an expiration date, let us know and we’ll add the Discount Codes tag to your listing.
• If we’ve accepted your site for a listing, we’ll let you know via email on the day it’s posted. Due to time constraints, we cannot respond personally to every submission or offer feedback on why your site didn’t make it in. If it’s been a month and you haven’t received an email notification of your review, it’s safe to assume we’ve passed on your submission.
• If you’re just suggesting a shop you like(meaning, you’re not the owner), please include your name and website address so we can credit you.
• Nothing says thank you like putting us on your links page. Reciprocal linking is not mandatory to be reviewed on our site, but we really appreciate it.