I’ve read about PleaseDressMe on a few sites, and whilst the idea of a t-shirt search engine sounds a little odd to me (I don’t go hunting for tees based upon their design elements), there does seem to be a lot of people that think its a great idea, so what the hell do I know?
For a search engine like PleaseDressMe to be successful, they need to have a massive amount of t-shirts in their database. Its not fair to judge PDM on that basis yet since they’re new and obviously still adding to their database, but I do wonder if they’ll be able to get enough tees that they can return adequate results for searches that are slightly more obscure than the typical tee fodder of ‘skull’ and ‘heart’*. Tagging could be an issue too; the way I would tag a t-shirt might not be the same way that someone doing a search would tag a tee, or, more importantly, the way that PDM might tag a shirt, I guess they can combat that by tagging a tee with everything they can think of, but then there would be issues of accuracy. I don’t want to rag on the site too much though, it is well done, I can imagine it being a good way for people to find tees when they’re on the hunt for something specific, and the people behind it all know their way around the internet, so I’d imagine that whatever potential problems I can think of, they’ve thought of them too.
*Since I initially wrote this article they introduced an API (like all web 2.0 companies) and a vendor programme which will allow shops to add their own tees to the database, which will help alleviate the problem of having to add inventory themselves.
