The newest player in the online t-shirt competition marketplace is Ink-Hound. Launched on November 11th, they have a great starting line up of designs from artists like a_mar_illo, Wotto, and Mathiole.
How does it work?
Artists submit hat and shirt designs , the community votes and provides feedback, and every 2-3 days a new hat and tee is chosen to be printed and put up for sale. Only one tee and one hat are available at a time. And they’re limited edition - once sold out, they’re gone forever.
What’s different about Ink-Hound?
- Fitted style hats in addition to t-shirts.
- Only one user-submitted and community-chosen hat and shirt design for sale at a time.
- Artists get $2 per item sold with no limit and their design rights back at the end of the selling period.
- Clean printing techniques with organic inks and offering organic tee options. Also, a portion of each sale will go to charity.
- Offers a wide variety of apparel options: fitted hats, mens and womens fitted tees, traditional fit tees, mens and womens organic tees, long sleeve tees, and hoodies.
What do we think?
The concept behind the site is solid and it looks like a good alternative (or complement?) to the Teefury system.
We dig the size of the artist cut and the fact that they keep rights to their design after the initial sale. The fact that a portion of the sales goes to charity is just a bonus.
Right now our biggest complaint is the look and feel of the site. While functional, it’s lacking some of the polish that other recently launched sites have had right out of the gate.
The previews of the designs are jaggy and hard to make out on all except for the design details page, the graphic elements of the site lack a unified style or color scheme, and many of the peripheral pages feel unfinished (the FAQ still has [insert link here] messages).
We’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt though, and we’re pretty sure they’ll be polishing the site up as they get further into launch.
Goodies for the first week
To celebrate the launch, they’ll be selling everything half off for the first week. A tee design by a_mar_illo is selling for $6, and a fitted hat design by Mathiole is selling for $8.
Whom we have featured recently. Discuss over at the forums.
With a slick flash interface that’s actually lush and pleasant to use, Nonoloa features a range of different designs and garment options.
A new collection is launched every 6 months by urban artists who create their designs with art direction from Nonoloa. Check out their winter collection on flickr or visit their website to pick up some of the awesome tees.
I’m usually pretty hip to all the blogs out there that talk about t-shirt design, but I was pleasantly surprised this weekend to stumble on TypoTees, who looks to be up and running seriously since September. I’m a typography junkie, so this definitely goes on my list of cool sites to watch.
“Typotees is a collection of typographic tshirts. We focus on the use of copy on tees or other pieces of fabric. Nice copy that is not placed on tees sometimes also get published. We are not fuckin’ nihilists.”
Some recent tees that they’ve featured:
New clothing line Stabb is set to have their official launch date as December 1st, but they’re going to start pre-orders as early as next week on their first two designs:
In talking about the new line, the founders say: “The idea for Stabb was formed during the summer of 2008. While on their first East Coast tour, band mates Ryan Grandmaison and Jason Dean of Something For Nothing started throwing around the idea of starting a t-shirt line with a strong focus on poultry. That’s right… chickens.” Say what?!
Fortunately for us, they decided to refocus on creating killer, unique designs and offering those for sale.
(What did you think of this tee? Vote!)
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