It feels like I’ve stolen that name, but I can’t remember where from. Anyway a new regular feature for HipHipUK will be the fortnightly industry roundup, or “Fortnightly Thread”. Here I’ll collect the most interesting things I’ve seen over the past two weeks and if I have anything interesting to say (yeah right), my opinion on them. I used to do this sort of thing occasionally for Spreadshirt, but makes more sense to publish it here as HipHipUK has been a bit quiet of late.

Lets begin:

1. Cafepress preparing for IPO? Been a few rumours about this over the past few months. This time its a fairly tenuous source of a new job advert mentioning IPO readyness. How about we have a completely unreliable look at the shape of their business via Alexa.

I wouldn’t read too much into these, they are a fairly mature company now so you wouldn’t expect large scale growth like the early years even in a market as large as the custom apparel industry, and Alexa is not the most useful tool. (via Custom T-shirt Talk)

2. Zazzle secures second round funding. Collecting a cool $30m from x and y. Looking forward to seeing how they invest this and what will become of the current big three of Cafepress, Zazzle and Spreadshirt. (via Techcrunch)

3. New design contest Design By Humans. This has picked up plenty of blog coverage, looks a well funded and slickly put together competitor to the established guys. Read the first part of my interview with them here.
Around the web:
- Their shirts in the shop
- Their shirts up close
- How quickly they respond to customer requests, this one for shipping (see comments)
- Their printing techniques
- Prize comparison over at Tcritic

4. Shirt Woot. Shirt section from the one deal, one day guys. Probably not a major competitor to the design contest I would say. Aiming more at the price conscious customer than the t-shirt enthusiast. But woot is a slick operator, with a massive community. so they’ll shift a ton of shirts at $10 (the start prices, rises to $15 if they aren’t sold by the next day). This will no doubt attract some pretty good designers looking for exposure and a quick buck. Woot offer the designer $2 a shirt, and work on low margins but high turnover. Which will favour the designer, who could make $2000 from one print run, probably in a day if all goes well. I like the daily descriptions to shirts (below is todays):

This shirt was designed by: Munich’s own Benny Kohl, a prolific contributor to A Better Tomorrow (see his A-B-T profile here) and ein Mann vieler Talente, as you can see from his personal portfolio site. Contact him here: info@yme-design.de
Wear this shirt to: look sharp during your epic battle with Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent.
Don’t wear this shirt to: our old middle school on a Thursday—you’ll get pinched.
This shirt tells the world: “Here be Monsters.”
We call this color: Soylent Kelly Green”

5. Goodstorm cancels t-shirt creator tool. These guys spread themselves pretty thin, this was always going to be a competitive area to get into, the shop model part of the business is still running though it seems. Obviously not competitive enough as their now going after the mp3 industry…. (via CustomT-shirt Talk again)

6. The people with too much time genius’ of Fantastic Bonanza invent Threadless Bingo, think Bullshit Bingo, without the bull, shit, and a lot more cotton. Threadless’ guys, if a shirt makes it on here, its probably time to reach for the retire button.

7. Frank Pillers interview over at Assignment Zero. Full blog post coming on this, but some really interesting comments about the Threadless guys and the new breed of web entrepreneurs, check out this comment

“…the first time, these were 23-year old guys that couldn’t talk in public and they were dressed like freaks, but already at this time were making half a million dollars profit each month without any risk investment, employees and capital.”

“…they were really totally different to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. You always knew there were young people with cool ideas who made a lot of money on the Internet.”

8. You go, we go, we all go, eco. Sorry for that, couldn’t resist a little rhyme to end the post. Is it a fad? Yep but as long as we all jump on and add them to our inventories, the more common they will become, the more we will buy them, the more we will forget there was ever an option not to have them, the more we will they will become, the more we will expect them. Similar to how AA went from ethical premium brand, to defacto standard tshirt for most quality sites. T-shirt Island had a post about a new eco shirt company. Teetonic also went organic recently (via HYA)

9. Threadless store gets closer, plans, re-usable bag coupons

Thats all, see something I should blog about? You can reach me via contact.