by Andy on November 5, 2009
Storenvy have a good rep for printing tees within the indie community, by which I mean that people on
Emptees rarely bitch about them, and from what I can tell their storefront hosting service is also held in high regard. A couple of days ago they released a new version of their site which aims to help those stores owners make more
sales, and help make it easier for t-shirt buyers to find shirts across their network of stores. To put it basically, you can search what they sell, it’s that simple, I’d add more words to this sentence but they’d be superfluous.
Search isn’t the only new feature to be included in the new Storenvy site, they’ve also introduced a concept called ‘Markets‘ which groups together stores that have something in common (such as fine art, eco-friendly, or urban wear), it’s an idea I like and thin that as it evolves it would work well for people trying to discover new companies in the same vein as ones that they already like. The forum is likely to be a useful hub for store owners, though as you would imagine so soon after launch things are still a bit quiet around there.
In the past if someone asked me about a third-party storefront to run their brand from I would have immediately said Big Cartel, but Storenvy could be an option worth looking at for a lot of budding tee-preneurs.
by Andy on September 29, 2009
Anyone remember
PleaseDress.Me? If not, it is/was a t-shirt search engine launched in September last year by some notable internet personalities, and received
quite a lot of fanfare in its first few month of operation. Things seem to have gone pretty quiet recently though, with
their Twitter account no being updated since the middle of April, coinciding with the last date that they seem to have updated the website, in fact, their
shirt of the day is quickly on the way to becoming shirt of the year. It’s a bit of a mystery to me that they would just stop updating it one day without any kind of explanation, so I’ve sent them an e-mail asking if the site is dead or if there are any plans to relaunch in the future, and if they get back to me I’ll update this post. Anyone here know anything I don’t about PleaseDressMe?
On
TeeSpree I searched for ‘skull’, got 883 results (from larger name brands for the most part), not bad at all,
PleaseDress.me, you have competition!
by Andy on September 9, 2008
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.
Please Dress Me
*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.
