Make your own hipster clothing with InnerTee

At South by Southwest, I met the guys from InnerTee, a custom T-shirt-making company. Other custom apparel operations, like Cafe Press, GoodStorm, and Zazzle are great sites for creating schwag--apparel using your own logos and slogans. But on InnerTee, you can only select from the painfully hip artwork already on the site. Baseline apparel prices on InnerTee are decent, but you pay for each art element you want to include on your item.

Yours for only $22.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

For example, my masterpiece, Monster Whisperer, started with a $12 T-shirt. But the five design elements I added to it racked the price up to $22. At least on InnerTee there's no minimum order size, and the clothing is all screen-printed. The founders I met were all wearing their own products, and they looked great.

Designing you own shirt is easy, and a lot of fun, with the site's Flash-based design tool (much like on the other custom apparel sites). It's a drag that you can't change the size of the art elements, but you can rotate them.

Artists can submit artwork for inclusion in the InnerTee design catalog, and they get a cut each time someone includes their work in an order. Users don't get cash for mixing artwork on items, but they do get "karma points" for creating mixes and for participating in the InnerTee community. Karma points can be redeemed for discounts on future orders. Coming this weekend: a Digg-like voting system that will award the top designers extra karma points.

[caroline.mccarthy]

Kind of like Neighborhoodies.com (eom)

[Miles Sims]

size & color limitations

Our main goal is to offer high quality tees similar to what you would find in a specialtiy retail store. Since we are using a screen-printing process this does limited the size & color varaitions but we feel that you get a higher quality shirt in the end.

We're always looking at new processes so it could change as we feel more confortable with the quality.

Thanks again for taking a look at the site!

[emosamurai]

I love InnerTee

I am a part of InnerTee and I am glad to see that it's getting the attention it deserves. I really think it's a one-of-a-kind online presence, because there are a TON of sites where you can buy cool shirts that local artists have made, and there are also sites where you can "make" your own artwork to go onto a shirt (usually it's some predetermined set of designs), but there's not really a site anywhere where you can BUY a cool shirt made my an artist or actually SUBMIT custom artwork to be included on a shirt, that might actually render you some money!!

Great article!