We've written before about platforms for minipreneurs that aggregate the offerings of many merchants in a single online or offline space. A few weeks ago Rumplo stepped into the fray with a t-shirt-specific site that helps consumers find the coolest t-shirts from independent makers around the world.
Brooklyn, NY-based Rumplo aims to make it easy to browse, search and subscribe to artist-produced tees from around the globe. Users can browse categories such as color, typography, slogan, photography or gradient (in addition to the more obvious "new" and "most popular"), and Rumplo serves up a selection of matching submitted shirts from independent producers all over the planet. Designers, stores and registered users can all participate in submitting links to t-shirts they love, and users can subscribe via RSS (e-mail delivery is coming soon) to their favorite designers, tags or topics. All t-shirts on the site are open to comments by registered users, along with designation as "faves." What users won't find, however, are the works of any on-demand printing sites, which Rumplo's founders have deliberately exluded.
It remains to be seen if Rumplo will charge sellers any kind of fee in the future, but meanwhile plans are apparently in the works for advertising support. By focusing on independent producers (and excluding others), Rumplo takes a partially curated approach that is sure to help users wade through the clutter and find the gems in the online t-shirt marketplace. A model to emulate in other markets!
Website: www.rumplo.com
Contact: www.rumplo.com/contact
Spotted by: Josh Mervis
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Thanks for profiling us! We're fans of Springwise.
A quick note: We'll never charge T-shirt shops or anyone else to post their work to Rumplo. Our biggest strength is having tons of great shirts from places all over the world, shirts that we'd never have heard of before we saw them on Rumplo. In other words, having lots and lots of small shops in one place is one of the best things about Rumplo and it works well because it's free.
We're working on some other new approaches to helping T-shirt shops small and large get more out of Rumplo, hopefully you'll hear about them soon!
I like Rumplo's approach as well sticking with the indie stuff, I profiled three T-Shirt directories like this on Tcritic earlier this month:
http://tcritic.com/archives/three-t-shirt-directories/
and one of my kind readers pointed out that I had missed Tfodder http://www.tfodder.com - which IMHO is as strong a design as Rumplo.
Karl Long | March 12, 2008 5:45 PM