I know that a lot of you will be looking at that title and thinking “yes, this is old news Andy” and you would be correct, but as we are well aware, I didn’t do a whole lot of writing last week, so I’m covering it now for anyone that was late to the party.
The company behind Emptees (Indie Labs, whose main concern is the Big Cartel Store Platform) have decided to shut down the website on March 1st, 2011. To say that it’s shocking news is a bit of an understatement, Emptees is very popular within the indie tee community, with a huge amount of active users, including many popular designers, artists and store owners who I regularly talk about here on HYA and get a lot of respect in the community. When people write to me asking for advice about starting up a clothing line, I usually send them to Emptees because that question has been asked and answered hundreds of times over there, by people with a lot more experience than I have (hell, it takes me weeks to release one product).
So why would Indie Labs want to close Emptees? Well, they’re sick of the negativity, the amount of time they have to put into it with no reward, and that it loses money. Emptees can be quite a negative place, if you post your work there or ask a stupid question (that has been asked many times before) then you can expect some brutally honest feedback in response. Some of it was necessary and born out of frustration (as with most arguments on the internet), but sometimes I felt it was unwarranted. It’s fair to say that the negativity came from a gradual fall in the quality of t-shirt submissions, as with all sites when it becomes popular there is a lot more content, and it usually isn’t of the same quality (were any of you around in the early days of Deviant Art? It was brilliant!), and that gave the mods a lot of work to do trying to keep up the quality by rejecting designs that simply weren’t up to scratch, and devalued the quality work be association.
In Indie Labs statement about the closure they bring up the issue of why they aren’t selling or giving away Emptees. Apparently the legal effort of either of those options is too much hassle to be worth it, something I find pretty surprising, as a site like Emptees would be of a lot of value to someone, and the community is already scrambling to create a replacement (Mintees.com is the front-runner at the moment). It seems sad that the site will be wiped off the face of the Internet in a few weeks, but I can understand why Indie Labs would want to focus on their core business, especially as they’ve got formidable (though probably friendly) competition in the form of Storenvy and a myriad of other hosted storefront platforms.
{ 9 comments }
