New ideas from the online t-shirt scene
Story bySjors Timmer
Sjors is a User Experience Designer, currently doing his MA in Digital Media in London and actively blogging about t-shirts. In the past he(show all)Sjors is aUser Experience Designer, currently doing his MA in Digital Media in London and actively blogging aboutt-shirts. In the past he has worked as lead designer for social and e-commerce sites.
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Tee vs. Tee
First one istee vs teefreelance programmer and designerAaron Baluczynskireshaped the idea of HotorNot to a place where also battle between shirts where possible, and thereby created an interesting way to find out what users like without pushing them tofav or rate shirts. Aaron is at the moment moving between cities, but he found some time to answer a few questions
It just came to me one day out of the blue. Sorry, no interesting story here. I’ll have my PR department work up a touching tale with just the right balance of personal genius and the hand of fate.
There haven’t been any big challenges, except some really boring, technical issues with SQL.
The internet offers too many options, whether it is information or t-shirts. It’s great that the web makes it possible for anybody to publish and sell, but it’s also a challenge for us as consumers to find, for example, the best t-shirts. I’m sure we’ll continue to see miniature Diggs and StumbleUpons emerging to tackle this problem in specific niches. A recommendation from a real person is still the best way to find great stuff.
Rumplo
Rumplois a kind of Digg for t-shirts (but than different) with extra options as sorting on tags, colors, and popularity. The site is build and designed byIan Van NessandSahadeva Hammari. Sahadeva was friendly enough to answer a few questions:
The idea for Rumplo just sort of appeared when I was looking around the web for cool T-shirts — “Wouldn’t it be convenient if I only had to go to one spot to find all the freshest tees?” Ian and I set out to build that place and it’s a big part of what you see at Rumplo today. Now the idea for Rumplo is growing and we hope to add some great tools for the hundreds of small, independent shops around the world making Brilliant Tees, tools that will make it easier for them to promote their work and find new fans on Rumplo. We’ll also continue to make it easier and easier for people to find their new favorite tees on Rumplo, of course, and browse them in new and interesting ways : )
Staying focused on the most important pieces of Rumplo turned out to be the most difficult part of building it. It’s so easy to be distracted by the thousand cool ideas that pop up in our heads. So staying focused turned out out to be the best thing that happened to us, as it pushed us to really build something that people would want to use and that artists and shops find works for them.
I think that people are going to start seeing a lot more international work, T-shirts that are really different from what they’re used to and that veer outside the norms we’ve come to expect in our local geographies.UniQlo is doing some really good stuff with their T-shirt line, and there are also tons of really creative, small shops in Europe and elsewhere that we’ve been really happy to see people submitting Rumplo. It’s fun to see people’s surprised comments when they see some of the cool shirts from far off places. At Rumplo we want to make it easy find and explore the world’s T-shirts in that way.
Top 5 t-shirts sites that count:
That is; according to me, you are allowed to disagree in the comments.
Threadlessis an insanely successful t-shirt shop, It has almost everything that could be seen as necessary to create a successful company; it has a user base who submit designs, other users will rate them and tell their interest in buying, and finally Threadless prints the t-shirts most wanted. Many sites have tried to copy this concept, but only a very few succeeded. WIRED’s Jeff Howeexplainedduring SocialStrategyTalk in Amsterdam last May why.
Rumploalready mentioned in the interview is a new way to browse the internet content in a meta view, although tried by many sites, the visual aspect and the standardization among t-shirts make this extremely useful.
Spreadshirt, one of Europe’s succesful former start-up companies, allowing people to print one shirt at the time, or start their own t-shirt shop by only designing the prints and leaving all the other work to Spreadshirt.
T-critic, one of the oldest and most consistently updating blogs, has even more readers than The Next Web (yet).
How to fold a shirt, an evergreen among the t-shirt videos, the classic Japanese way of folding a T-shirt. Has more thanthousand tributeson Youtube.
Shirtlog.com, no top 5 is ever complete without a 6th item. My own sandbox to keep in track with the latest shirts, and practice a bit with what it takes to run a thematic weblog.
Concluding
What I think is interesting in the t-shirt case is that it shows that any content on the Internet can be reworked and redistributed. Not only blog posts, written text or photos, but also consumer products (or at least the text and photos of them) can be reordered and reworked by a group of people. And although we’ve already seen a lot of work on the area of media, I think there are still enough objects of fascination left: cars, houses, paintings, food, electronics, books, you name it.. also could make a great group driven suggesting community.
