Our good friends AJ and Gary Vaynerchuk launched PleaseDressMe recently, a search engine for tshirts. Kind of a brilliant idea over there. How many times have you been looking for a shirt you saw on someone by Googling the phrase, or browsing through every tshirt site out there. Do you know how many tshirt sites are out there??
This is a great example of meeting a need in a very niche market doing something incredibly simple: Give people a box to type in and return what they’re looking for. Slap on an API and some very simple widgets and you’ve got a way for vendors and retailers to integrate your site into theirs, and everyone wins.
I really love these simple solutions people have been building lately to meet very simple and obvious needs. It’ll be interesting to see how PleaseDressMe develops over the next few months. Well done, guys!
Rahul
on 12 Sep 08That could be even more awesome when combined with Polyvore (http://www.polyvore.com)
Aussie
on 12 Sep 08Now that would be useful if it were not limited to the US
Matt
on 12 Sep 08sounds pretty much like rumplo
Dale Cruse
on 12 Sep 08Mark my words: One day, after AJ graduates from college, his brother Gary will retire from Wine Library TV and just sit around thinking of good website ideas together.
Tim Jahn
on 12 Sep 08Great, simple idea! I especially enjoy the URL choice
Chris Mills
on 12 Sep 08I love fresh web ideas but a little curious to know how it makes money. Please excuse my ignorance.
Matt
on 12 Sep 08@Chris, I would assume they are making money through a affiliate links to the tshirts. I mean that seems like the most logical way to make the site work.
Brian Adkins
on 13 Sep 08Search seems weak compared to teenormous.com but they do seem to be getting a lot of buzz. Lots of noise, not much signal…
DanGTD
on 13 Sep 08They make money from the tshirts’ vendors, of course. Every click goes through an affiliate link before landing on the store page. There seems to be more third-party affiliate sites, probably depending on what each store and pleasedressme finally agreed upon.
JM
on 13 Sep 08“How many times have you been looking for a shirt you saw on someone by Googling”
Suppose I see a t-shirt and want to find how to buy it off the internet. Now, instead of Googling “Do you smell what Barack is Cookin t-shirt,” I’m supposed to google “t-shirt search engine,” see this site pop up, and then use it instead? The first result from Google is already what I want. Will this site have regular users? Are there people that want to look up t-shirts so often that it’s worth remembering that there’s this niche alternative to Google? I don’t get it.
DennisSC
on 13 Sep 08JM makes a great point. Other than blog posts like this one, how are people hearing about this? Facebook/MySpace?
Still, once they get the word out, I don’t see why they shouldn’t do well.
kareem
on 15 Sep 08http://www.teecrush.com and rumplo.com have been doing this for months…
Matt
on 16 Sep 08Love the Rumplo site. How long has that been around for?
Layne Hunter
on 16 Sep 08We have found sites like shirtsonsale, rumplo, and others can extract our tshirt data from our RSS feeds, as a vendor it takes a ton of time to just maintain a site, there is not much motivation to take more time and upload all designs (in our case a new design everyday at TeeFury.com). I do think the site looks great though! Is there any easy way to load tees that is more automatic?
WebSherpa
on 17 Sep 08This is an exercise in internet celebrity, web 2.0 logos, and bad domain names. They’ll make tons of money because GaryV is already so popular, but I just don’t see why this site is getting so much coverage, and from the likes of CNET even. It’s a manually populated database for Pete’s sake. I just don’t see the innovation, outside of the internet marketing efforts that GaryV has already shown grandmaster ninja skills at in his other ventures.
If I was behind any of the other t-shirt search engines out there and didn’t have an already internet-famous brother, I’d be pissed.
Benjy
on 17 Sep 08Web 2.0 Logos make me want to part with my money. It must be that they are shiny! ;)
This discussion is closed.