E-commerce site Threadless has spent the last decade crowdsourcing art for its t-shirts and allowing users to vote on which designs it should run. Now it’s giving more power to its customers and enabling them to create and have small runs of t-shirts with funny sayings they come up with.
To do so, Threadless has released its new Type Tees app, which lets anyone quickly design a t-shirt based on whatever funny slogan or witty saying they’d like to wear. The company then custom-prints those t-shirts and sends them to customers within days of purchase.
The Type Tees concept isn’t new — in fact, years ago Threadless had sought out funny sayings that it could put on t-shirts. The problem was that there was too much interest, according to Threadless founder and CEO Jake Nickell. The company received about three million slogans in the time that it had Type Tees submissions available, but only printed about 180 of those.
Now it doesn’t require the community to vote on which designs they would buy — they can simply create their own. The app includes and intuitive interface for entering text and choosing from a group of different font templates that customers can use for their t-shirts.
Once that’s done, they simply add to cart and purchase. Customers can also share the t-shirts they make with others so that they can buy them as well. For now, shirts cost $22 each, and are generally shipped within 24-48 hours after being ordered.
The Type Tees app follows the company’s launch of its own iPhone app for mobile commerce. Both apps were built by mobile design shop Prolific Interactive.