One Year Of Tees - Over $400K In T-Shirt Sales Despite the Economy

Background

It was one year ago today on August 28th, 2008 that we launched Teenormous, our t-shirt search engine. We thought what better way to celebrate than to look back on the progress of Teenormous and share some of the more interesting tidbits about our growth.  This post is partially inspired by a few other entrepreneurs that we respect and admire.

First off, we’re just two average guys doing this part-time (we have “real” 9-5 jobs) with no funding and no financial backing. We are the owners, the coders, the marketers, the PR team, everything. The advantage of this is that our operating costs are next to zero and we only have to answer to ourselves. We use open source software and our only real cost has been our time, some money spent to hire a graphics designer for a few things, and web hosting fees with SliceHost (who is excellent by the way).

Statistics

In the first month of existence, we made a profit. A tiny profit, but a profit nonetheless. Just about every stat we can think of has gone up since then. Currently we’re hovering in the high 60Ks on Alexa and here are some other graphs of our traffic growth over the first year (click to enlarge):

Google Analytics

Compete.com

Highlights

• 1.44 million visitors
• 5.94 million page views
• 1.01 million t-shirt searches have been made this year
• We’ve sent over 460,000 t-shirt shoppers to our t-shirt merchants this year
• 74,921 shirts indexed

Our traffic grows each month but our current averages are:

• 190,000 visitors per month
• 750,000 page views per month
• 135,000 t-shirt searches per month

Top Searches

Here are some of our top searches of the past year in no particular order:

• Star Wars t-shirts
• Star Trek t-shirts
• 80s t-shirts
• Harry Potter t-shirts
• Video Game t-shirts
• Superhero t-shirts
• Geek t-shirts
• College t-shirts
• Transformers t-shirts
• Nintendo t-shirts

Money

It’s really interesting to us to see that in these financial times, people are still spending lots of money on t-shirts they find on Teenormous. We don’t have the ability to track every sale made through Teenormous. However, using very conservative estimates based on the sales we can track, we estimate we’ve sent over $425,000 in t-shirt sales to our t-shirt merchants this past year, and monthly sales rise nearly every month. Despite the economy, the t-shirt business is definitely booming.

Future Plans

So, what does the future hold for Teenormous? Well, we have no plans to abandon Teenormous. It has become successful much faster than we expected and we aim to keep the momentum going. Teenormous will continue to be the best place to find great t-shirts on the internet. We will be rolling in many more enhancements to the site over the next year to make searching for t-shirts even easier.

Thanks

Having said all this, we’d like to say a great big THANK YOU to all of our fans, the t-shirt community, the people that use Teenormous to find a t-shirt to buy and wear, and the awesome sites out there that sell so many great tees. We could not have come this far without you. We plan on adding even more great features to help you find the perfect t-shirt so stick around, we’re just getting started.

If there are any stats we left out that you are interested in or have other questions, ask them in the comments and we’ll try and update this post with the answer(s).

Tom and Brian
(The Teenormous Team)

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