To kick start UK week I have an interview with Paul from Teetonic, the excellent scottish based design contest site. I’m always impressed with the high quality of the designs that win their competition, some examples of which I’ve handily littered throughout the interview. I also like that a royalty is paid per sale on top of a cash prize for winning designs. I’d like to thank Paul for an excellent interview with some interesting insights about the role of community in teetonic.

It’s taken a while to get this part ready to be posted, but here is part 3 of my interview with Stagr. As Nick and I talked through parts 1 & 2 I can see a lot of similarities between stagr’s business model and innertee. Both aim to offer advanced customisation but within the confines of a brand, utilising community to create design elements for users to purchase in their creations, mini-mass-customisation I call it, for no logical reason. Miles and I have talked t-shirts several times online so I introduced them both and this is what followed, how interesting it is for anyone but me, nick and miles I’m not too sure.

So I’m planning on getting some UK specific content next week. Talking to some illustrators, sites and stores and stuff. I’ll confess to having not done a huge amount towards this yet, but I’m confident it will sort itself out and the content will appear from somewhere.

I want to redesign the site, any budding artists up for the challenge? If so, get in touch. I could use some more contributors as well. If you like what you read here and would like to contribute let me know.
This week in tshirts:

1) New tees at Imaginary Foundation (via Torso)
2) Some great new designs at Threadless, Steak & Eggs and last weeks “The Imposter” are my favourites.
3) Spreadshirt marches on, acquires Sozeug. I interview Patrice from La Fraise.

4) Tshirt love from Boing Boing for the user created Toronto TTC tshirts over at the Torontoist

Have a good weekend.

A Better Tommorow is an promising german hybrid store shocase, design contest and virtual commuinity. I chatted to one of its founders Andre about its origins, business model and community.

I realy enjoyed this feature on the escapist about shills. I don’t think “Jack” has anywhere near the power he thinks he has, but it was interesting none the less. Especially now that I work in the industry that I’ve studied and blogged about. I think in the future the power of these undercover shills will only diminish as the net becomes increasingly crowded with marketers telling us how great their products are. This has lead to the rise in importance of services such as Digg or any of the review sites which aggregate opinion, these should be much harder to influence.

The comments to this article are also entertaining, I particularly likes this one

“Devious tricks, indeed, but I don’t think we are going to ever have to worry about undisputed industry leader Sony resorting to shabby tricks like this. After all, when you are the maker of the PlayStation(R) brand of video game systems, you don’t need to resort to cheap tricks such as this. Take the PlayStation 3, for instance: You never see OGM’s pushing the PlayStation 3 on communities because it is so innovative, with Blu-Ray player and true 1080p high definition capabilities… people are going to be lining up on launch day to buy it! It would be a waste of marketing dollars for Sony to pay OGM’s to flaunt how awesome the PS3 is, because the consumer already knows that it is the best.

 

  

File this under “I wish I’d thought of it first” (although I do have a vague memory of something similar a few years back, can anyone jog my memory?). Tcritic has launched a fun little web 2.0 side project called Tshirt War. Users upload tshirt designs which are battled against other user submissons. Only an early beta at this stage and lacking in features (such as the promotion of winning designs from each battle against other winning designs) its still a fun idea and a good way to discover some cool tees.

The amount of love the online tshirt/clothing industry is getting recently is really interesting, madeforone.com said they “sense a tipping point coming…”, I think its probably already tipped. I’m not sure if its the cool projects like A Better Tommorow (interview coming soon) or the realisation that there is real $’s to be had that is driving this interest. I expect its a little of both but more of the latter. Its reminiscent of the interest in sneaker collecting in sites such as Sneakerplay or Crooked Tongues. While I know nothing about the scene it was an industry which appeared repeatedly in the Mass Customisation literature. I think what is suprising in that scene is how clued up the big players like Nike or Adidas are in involving and feeding these communities and enthusiasts, recognising the role that early adopters play in driving the industry and influencing sales further up the tail (something for me that was missing from the Long Tail by Chris Anderson).