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  • BleuFlamme Lets You Make Your Own Custom Shirt In 3D

    John Biggs

    Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

    Sunday, December 18th, 2011

    If there’s one thing the world needs it’s a service that lets you build a shirt using 3D rendering technology. Sure we could use cars that run on water and world peace, but let’s get the little things out of the way, right?

    Thankfully, there’s BleuFlamme, a website created by a gaggle of eight engineers who have dedicated their lives to the sale of custom shirts.

    Building a shirt is fairly simple: you pick a style, a collar, some fabric, stick it all together, and they have it made in Hong Kong and shipped to you. They start at $99 each – a bit steep, but it sure beats a trip to Cameron Road. We’ve covered a number of these custom shirt sites, most recently J Hilburn and all of them seem to be improving upon the age old custom tailoring model. The question, then, is whether this model needs disruption?

    There are plenty of folks out there who want custom clothing. I’m no clothes-horse but a nice custom shirt looks good. $99 good? Hey, if you’ve got the IPO cash, why not flaunt it?

    BleuFlamme isn’t sitting still and will be improving their service over the next year. Quoth founder Jin Takahito:

    This coming Q1 we will release a rotatable 3D shirt model so you can preview your shirt design from all angles – implemented in pure HTML5 – something from a technical standpoint, is very hard to accomplish but in return provides better user experience from across any browsers any device. I will also introduce Community Gallery of shirt designs contributed by our users where you can get some initial inspirations when designing your own dream shirt.

    He also notes that “We are pushing human civilization forward as we speak,” which is a pretty noble goal, although a bit shortsighted. We’re going to need custom shirts when we leave to civilize species on other planets, Jin. Will you be there for us?

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