With the steady increase in consumers buying their fashion gifts online, specifically, t-shirts, I wanted to compile a detailed list on some of the top options for you out there in the 'Ready made' field. Here's a list of sites that take care of the sale of your business online as well as print on your product with professional quality. These are becoming popular because it allows the designer to test his/her product. Some of these sites have a social network type platform which allows people to vote and buy your product all in one place. Alot of these types of sites are cool because they have massive amounts of traffic daily who would probably be your target market. I'd recommend these sites for t-shirt designers who just want to start with a few designs and/or if you just want to sell your designs and keep the operation simple. Either way, you still have the opportunity reach tons of people and get your designs in the marketplace.
- BustedTees and Defunker are two very different Net T-shirt services from the same company. Bustedtees is more about humor, while Defunker offers more designer solutions akin to Threadless. Both sites are really slick, but between the two, Defunker feels a bit snappier. There's also a pretty large price gap, with most Bustedtees topping out at around $16, and Defunker averaging in the high-$20s and mid-$30s.
- T-ShirtHell. There's a reason this site has a warning page and a hellish name. These shirts are the kind that will get you stares in public, and usually not for a good reason. Definitely not for the faint of heart, or workplace.
- Threadless is one of the most popular shirtmakers out there. It started out with user votes to pick out which shirts would go on sale, and have since moved on to independent designers. When shirts sell out, they're typically not for sale again unless the demand becomes great. They're also set to open a retail store in Chicago next month.
- Glarkware, a small Canadian shirt company, is based out of Toronto, Ontario, and has a fairly eccentric line of humor-related shirts.
- Shirt.Woot. From the same bunch that does good ol' Woot.com and Wine.Woot.com, is Shirt.Woot.com--a one-shirt-per-day service that rolls out a new design every night at midnight Central time. Every shirt is always $10 with free shipping, along with the option to get it delivered in two days for another five bucks. While a good deal of the shirts are designed by professionals, the service also runs a weekly "derby" with user-generated designs. The most popular design goes on sale, and the designer gets a cut of the profits.
T-shirt Design from Fire Star Clothing at www.firestarclothing.com [find out how to get your ad here].
- Bountee is a hybrid service that offers both professionally designed T-shirts and a build-it-yourself solution. Bountee features a variety of "Web 2.0" features like tagging, user ratings, and commenting. It's also got a really slick, easy-to-use design.
- Split The Atom is a U.K.-based T-shirt company that's pretty much exactly like Threadless, but with a smaller selection. It also takes user designs in return for a one-time cash prize.
- Design by Humans has a very small collection of shirts, but offers some pretty decent prize money for winning designers with a daily, weekly, and monthly design contest. Each designer also gets their own profile page for listing any background information and to showcase some of their other works.
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The Cotton Factory doesn't actually make cotton, but they have a very solid selection of designer, and humor T-shirts. There's even a section of T-shirts less than 10 bucks. There's some real gems in this place, especially if you like "ninja" apparel.
T-shirt Design from Fire Star Clothing at www.firestarclothing.com [find out how to get your ad here]
- Jinx is best known as the clothing company who handles all of Digg.com's merchandise. They also have a handful of video game-related apparel and shirts for Rotten Tomatoes, Revision3, and CNET's own GameSpot.
- SnorgTees (formerly SnorgStore.org) is a humor-centric T-shirt site that does a new design every week. Shirts run at about $16 a pop, and the site ships worldwide.
- Neighborhoodies is another hybrid site that mixes up professionally designed shirts with a build-it-yourself tool. Like Innertee (see the DIY section below), there's a smattering of graphics you can incorporate into your own custom designs.
