Epic Tees—The premier tee gallery

I’ve obviously been getting really into the tee culture as of late, and one thing I’ve noticed is that there is no solid, exceptionally designed  gallery to see all the tees that are out there. There are plenty of places to plop your tee to show off, but I feel none of the sites execute with the proper style an industry such as this deserves.

I think great designers deserve a great showroom, and that’s the mission behind Epic Tees. I’m still working on the design and debating what platform I develop it in. Here’s what I’ve narrowed it down to:

• Using Wordpress would be easiest for me, but it would also be the most limiting. Hacking up a pre-made theme with the proper functionality and making sure it maintains a particular level of aesthetic integrity would be hard to do—or damn near impossible.
• I could hire a programmer to do exactly what I want, but this would cost money now as well as in the future when I need an update. As I covered before, money is tight for me right now, though things seem to be turning around with the freelance work (I’ll post about it soon).
• I’m tempted to finally crack open my Beginning Ruby book and to take Epic up as my first fully-developed site. The language is supposedly the easiest to learn when stacked with Rails, and I’d like to be a little less oblivious in regards to code. Right now, it all looks like the Matrix to me once I step outside the realm of HTML and CSS.

As with my other projects, there is a business model involved. Remember, always have a business model. Epic Tees will let any designer or company add their tee for a fee of $10. This is to keep spammers out and to make it so I can tell clients to shove off when I have designs to put into Epic’s listing.

My goal is to get the site to hold 1,000 shirts and be PageRank 4 by the next Google PR update and to make the $10 worth it for the back link value alone, on top of the potential sales the site will generate for everyone. Obviously, some brands have affiliate programs and I will throw in as many shirts as I can from these companies so long as the quality isn’t laughable. If you’ve got a clothing label, give me a shout! I’ll gladly add you for free for the initial release.

Which platform do you think I should use? Is $10 too little per shirt, too much, or just right?

I’ve been on a real creative kick the past week, which might explain why I’m out doing things rather than taking the time to blog. I’ve done a little work for Noah’s project, betArcade. I’ve applied for the internship position available at Challenge Games—the people who created Duels as well as the new game Baseball Boss (the project I’d be working on if I get the position); both are browser-based games. They’ve gotten about $15M in funding from big daddy VC firm Sequoia within the past few months, so things are looking in their direction for sure. I’ll cover more on their market later.

Lately Jörg, my partner on Datewi.se, and I have been kicking around ideas regarding development for iPhone applications, and one very simple one came to mind today which I took the time to mock up: A gallery featuring t-shirt designs from companies all over the web displaying shirts randomly pulled from our database in a grid, where users can click on a design to order it if they like it.

T-Shirt Gallery displaying random shirts

The app would be monetized similarly to Gary Vaynerchuk’s brand new site Please Dress Me where shirts are sold via affiliate deals with the shirts’ retailer websites, and our app would also charge a listing fee per shirt hovering at about the same price as your average shirt ($15-20). The image above displays how the app could look when opened, shuffling through the database to display shirts at complete random (though I only used AntiClothes shirts in my demo). I’m not sure I like the grid; I think it could look much more structured and less cramped in the iPhone interface.

iPhone T-Shirt App Search Functions

It will also have a search function, allowing the user to search based on what color tee they are looking for, particular tagwords that interest them, and also price (not displayed). For instance AntiClothes’ Zombie shirt might be tagged with ‘zombie’, ‘blood’, ’smear’, ‘red’, ‘black’, etc. etc.—By the way, go get this shirt before Holloween; it’ll be a hit. In the demo, I searched for both a description and a brand name, so if you wanted to look specifically through one brand’s offerings, you can.

I intend to bring this to market. It’ll be a great exercise for me in developing the front-end of an iPhone application and will be great back-end work for Jorg, especially since we have a much heavier app in the pipeline, as well as other ideas we’d like to get out.

What do you guys think of this app? Would you use it? Should we charge users for it?