Teenormous Turns Two - 140,000 Tees And Other Big Numbers

It’s hard to believe it’s already been two years since we launched Teenormous back on August 28, 2008. We initially set out to build a t-shirt search engine because we noticed there were a ton of great t-shirt merchants but no easy way to keep up with all the t-shirts available online. We hoped a few others might find this useful as well, but boy did we underestimate how many fellow t-shirt lovers there are! We’ve had a tremendous second year of growth, made lots of new friends in the t-shirt industry, and most of all, enjoyed every minute of it. Following on our one year update, we’d like to celebrate Teenormous turning two by sharing some of the highlights and stats of the past year.

Past Year Statistics

Teenormous had some impressive growth in the past year, far beyond our expectations. Our stats compare this years totals vs last years since t-shirt sales vary due to market seasonality with a huge spike around Christmas. As you can see in this Google Analytics image, in the past year we had:

• 2,442,793 Visits (+91.50%)
• 11,757,777 Pageviews (+121.34%)
• 4.81 Pages/Visit (+15.59%)

Current Monthly Statistics

This image shows our monthly stats for August, 2010. For the past month we’ve had:

• 229,337 Visits
• 1,225,530 Pageviews
• 5.34 Pages/Visit

As for Teenormous itself, we currently have 140,880 shirts indexed from 139 t-shirt merchants. We added 38 new merchants this past year. While many of our merchants are larger, more established t-shirt vendors, we also love to promote newer merchants just starting out. Of our active merchants, 55 have less than 50 t-shirts each and 22 have less than 10. Let’s hear it for the entrepreneurial spirit!

We continue to be blown away by the number of people using Teenormous to buy great t-shirts. In our second year, we’ve sent over $800,000 in t-shirt sales to our merchants. For the 2010 calendar year we’re on track to reach over $1 million in t-shirts sales just in 2010 alone. Below is a graph of sales for the last year.

As is typical with many retailers, a huge percentage of our year’s sales come around the holidays.

Site improvements

We’re always making improvements (both big and small) to the site. Here are just a few things we did over the past year to make the site better:

Categories: Sometimes you just don’t know what kind of t-shirt you are looking for. To provide some inspiration, over the past year we’ve put together an exhaustive list of popular t-shirt categories so you can just browse through our giant list of tees.

Helpful tips: As we managed Teenormous throughout the year, we started realizing we were learning things that can help merchants and designers sell more tees. We started writing these things down for others to learn from. We’ve only done two so far (How to get your t-shirt designs printed and Link other colors) and we do plan on writing more with the insight into the t-shirt biz that we have gained from running Teenormous.

Popular T-shirt Lists: In addition to categories, our growing collection of popular t-shirt lists is proving to be an excellent source for finding t-shirt ideas. We’ve released several new lists over the past year as well as kept all the current ones up to date as new t-shirts come in. Here are some of our favorite t-shirt lists:

• Funny Science T-shirts
• Best Dinosaur T-shirts On The Internet
• Funny Math T-shirts
• The Funniest Unofficial Star Wars Tees

Automation: On the backend of the site, everything is fully automated now so all the tees are updated at least once a week for every merchant on the site. We grab the latest and greatest tees and remove any that are no longer available for purchase. Our goal is to always show the latest selection of t-shirts you can buy online.

Thanks/Recognition

Teenormous wouldn’t be half as successful if it weren’t for the help of many others.  We’d like to send a heartfelt thanks to each of our incredible and growing list of t-shirt merchants, we couldn’t exist without you. We’d also like to thank all of our users and supporters for your continued feedback and support.

Additional Mentions

• We also must thank all the great artists and designers out there making awesome tees. In addition to sites like 80stees, Stylin Online, and MyTeeSpot that feature licensed tees, we also showcase many sites that sell indie/designer tees such as: Threadless, RedBubble, Psycho Reindeer, Rizzo Tees, Glennz, and many more.
• 37signals - Thanks for both RubyOnRails and Getting Real. Teenormous is built on RubyOnRails and we don’t think we could have executed as well as we have without it. As a team of two that maintains Teenormous in our spare time, Getting Real has proven to be a crucial guide book to follow for doing more with less, and focusing on what matters.
• We’d also like to give a shout out to some of the entrepreneurial bloggers who inspire us: Balsamiq, ASmartBear, Patrick McKenzie (of Bingo Card Creator and A/Bingo Testing fame) and Software by Rob to name just a few.

If you want to keep up with us, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and/or subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed to find out the latest on Teenormous, t-shirt giveaways and t-shirt coupon codes. We will be giving away free tees to our followers soon (starting tomorrow).

How to get your t-shirt designs printed

We recently received this email:

I see some dope custom design shirts on your site but now I want to know where do they make those? Because I have some custom design myself and trying to find a site but everytime the company say no we can’t do that so I hope you can give me a link to the site that make’s/prints those shirts u advertising for ?

Since Teenormous is just a search engine, printing t-shirts is not really our specialty. However, here is a brief summary of your options:

1) Print them yourself. Most of the merchants we feature that design their own tees print the tees themselves. However, if you have no background here that could be a tough learning curve and involve startup costs.

2) Find a (local) screen printer to do the work. This is a good option if you can make the price work. Screen printers are typically more expensive than do it yourself or PODs below but the quality is usually great.

3) Use a Print On Demand (POD) site. Many upcoming artists start out with POD sites such as: http://redbubble.com, http://zazzle.com or http://cafepress.com. They are very fast to setup and great if you are just starting out. However, most experienced designers graduate to another method of printing to control the quality and costs a bit more.

4) Create an online storefront. Sites like http://www.storenvy.com/ or http://bigcartel.com/ can give you an easy way to sell your tees. StoreEnvy also does screen printing but you need to have them printed already with Big Cartel (they just supply the site/store).

5) Enter a design competition. If all else fails you can try submitting your design to one of the popular tee design contest sites like:

• http://threadless.com
• http://designbyhumans.com

Good luck! Once you get your dope t-shirts printed, let us know so we can list them on Teenormous and send you some buyers!

Some advice for tee shops: link other colors, sizes, genders

Not every online store has the ability to choose tee colors on the design page so many sites have to have a separate page for each of the tee colors for a design.

If you do have to do this, be sure and link to all the other colors from each of the pages. For example… you have a FooBar design that comes in two colors of tee:
http://someteesite/foobar_orange.html
and
http://someteesite/foobar_grey.html

On the orange page you should have something like:
This foobar design also available in grey
and on the grey page:
This foobar design also available in orange

Someone might go directly to one of the pages and think it’s a cool design but not like the color tee and not realize you have it in another color. By mentioning it right there, while they are on your site, you could potentially make a sale you wouldn’t have otherwise. Some people will just move on to another site, thinking you don’t have the tee in a color they want - don’t let them go!

The same thing applies to men’s and women’s versions and even if you have separate pages for larger sizes (XL, XXL, XXXL, etc). Be sure and link back and forth between the two in case a guy hits the women’s version of your tee or vice versa. Show them you do have what they are looking for. Snorg Tees does this. Click on any of their tees and you will see on that page a link that says “Available in women’s sizes” or “Available in men’s sizes”

Zombie t-shirts!

We just posted our list of the best and most awesome zombie t-shirts we could find. Take a look and let us know what you think!

• Awesome zombie tshirts

The debate rages on - Pirates vs Ninjas

We compiled a list of the best and funniest pirate t-shirts and ninja t-shirts we could find on Teenormous. Which one has the better tees?

• Funny pirate t-shirts
• Funny ninja t-shirts