When I first started t-shirt blogging about 2.5 years ago, I remember counting active T-shirts with my fingers. It read them in daily basis (sometime from my rss readers but often by directly visiting the blog) and put some comments as well. Blogs' topic are not far from Threadless and CafePress' shirts, and I remember having problem looking for quality indie tee brands -- as I screened through iloveyoutshirt links page as well as T-shirtlinks.com -- for me to blog about.
Today, I can see more than 100 T-shirt blogs (including more than a dozen highly active ones) as documented on Hideyourarms and further elaborated on Buy-tees. Despite lack of time I have to visit each of these blogs; I'm really glad to see growing number of people writing T-shirts and spread the cotton-love bugs.
And yesterday, another proud moment for me, I saw a new section on Alltop dedicated to all things T-shirt. Alltop is Guy Kawasaki's webs/blogs/forums directory, organized by relevant niche topics from dating, Do-it-Yourself, movies to e-commerce (and T-shirt indeed). The directory has been focus on promoting quality contents from the web, featuring highly visited websites and blogs.
Being featured on Alltop, I feel like online T-shirt community has been recognized as important niche that can be ignored. There are lots more bloggers, fashion and graphic design people, entrepreneurs and hobbyist join the online T-shirt industry recently. Will 2009 be our year? I bet so!
5 comments:
Just noticed the Alltop recognition ourselves yesterday as well. Year of the t-shirt, eh? I wonder if 2008, with a massive explosion in boutique designers and information outlets as well as the first inkling of the waning power of Threadless, will retrospectively be considered the Year of the T-shirt.
Great point Eden, I am just happy to see this industry looking stronger in an economic year that hurt almost every other industry. Just shows that everyone needs t shirts and the price is never going to be to high compared to most products. Special kudos to cottonable for becoming a major authority t shirt blog.
It's great to see the industry growing! When I was putting together a list, I came up with 32 active t-shirt blogs to feature on the I Heart T-Shirts page - http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-Heart-T-Shirts/11457629468 (Including Cottonable, though with the old favicon!) so it looks like it's time for an update! Hopefully the trend continues into the new year...
@ Eden: yeah, this year has been great. We'll see next if the new boutiques can still stand on their feet for one year ahead
@ Dutch: you make me blush by calling me "authority" -- I don't think I'm in that position but thanks :)
@ Cory, you do good stuff out there with Facebook. Already be your fan!
Good to see this industry getting the recognition it deserves. I'm sure it can keep growing in 2009 if everyone keeps up their support (thanks bloggers).
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