10 thrilling days of 2008 have passed and finally I am writing my first post of the year. Although, I hadn’t planned for this particular post but a series of developments have provoked me to write about a topic which I’ve addressed in the past before. Online Custom T-shirts services are quite popular in the West and the rest of the world with Zazzle.com, Cafepress.com, Shirtcity.com and Threadless.com among the popular ones.
Coming back to India, although the growth was little slow initially, recent trends indicate this business has started picking up well. Several companies now offer consumers a well thought-out solution for online gifting. Other than that they’re leveraging the community aspect by allowing the designers to showcase their designs and generate revenue out of it. I had talked about online-gifting portal Myntra last year which are conventionally different from photo-sharing & gifting portals like Picsquare, Itasveer and Fobaz. Since then, there are several other websites that have come up.
Some of them are:
Pringoo.com – Pune based Pringoo.com is a recent entry in the market of customized products. Site users can Create & Share unique designs, Buy unique collection of designs and Sell their collections at a % commission.
The range of products on offer include T-shirt, Mug, Teddybear, Coaster, Bag & Mousepad. Currently in beta, the site is intuitive and it is quite evident that special emphasis has been given towards the usability.
I signed up for the service with my gmail account and like it usually happens the account activation email landed in my spam folder. (any guesses why ? 🙂 )
- Pringoo is not just about buyers. Its a platform for designers to showcase their talent and earn from them. For the designers, the process is quite simple. They upload their creations for different merchandises, open an online store website which consolidates all their creations at a single marketplace and start selling.
- As far as the percentage commission is concerned the upper limit is that of 15%. It isn’t mentioned on the home-page though !
Check out more coverage on Pringoo.com here !!!
Footees.in – Is one of the funkiest sites around and as the name suggests its all about tees…. The mood of the portal is targeted towards the youth. Footees is a product from the house of Hyderabad based eYantra – a popular name in the gifting & merchandising industry.
- Footees is dedicated towards T-shirt selling yeah that’s about it
- Only one type of T-shirt is available i.e. half-sleeve
- Footees has partnered with several institutes which has helped all those college students who want to have flaunt their batch shirts
GNOME T’s – Mumbai based Gnome might not be the best in usability, navigation and user-friendliness but its driven by ‘Users’. Users submit their designs which are rated by the community and everyday there’s a winning design. Like Footees.in Gnome is also in to just T-shirts. The designs at Gnome are also available at retail stores across Mumbai for all those aren’t tech-savvy. Site designers need to improve upon the look-and-feel and even think about partnering with retail stores outside Mumbai.
webVastra.in – Sluggish design, text which is not readable, bad color combination 😦 nope there’s more to webVastra than just that ! Bunch of IIT guys have got together to provide customized t-shirts from the export house from Tirupur, TN. Primarily users can create their own designs or buy pre-designed T-shirts.
Myntra.com – I’ve covered Myntra.com previously and since that time Myntra.com has grown in stature. The quality of T-shirts, features for designers, various contests you got them all at Myntra. It does rock for sure !
| Portal | Flat Price (Half-Sleeve Large t-shirt) |
Special-offers / Contests | Designer Marketplace |
| Pringoo | 403 | Yes | Yes |
| Footee | 249 | Yes | Yes |
| Gnome | 325 | Yes | Yes |
| webVastra | 300 | No | No |
| Myntra | 450 | Yes | Yes |
The above table lists the average price of half-sleeve large t-shirt at various custom gifting portals. Its quite clear that Pringoo and Myntra’s prices are slightly higher. Its because of the quality t-shirt brands (Wrangler, Banana Republic) they use.
With the emergence of these startups in the Indian online retail market its great signs ahead for the Indian consumers. The buying trends are shifting towards online purchases and with competition on the rise the prices are bound to drop 🙂
Update on t-shirt brands –
A little clarification on the t-shirt brands being used
Pringoo.com – Banana Republic, Guess and GAP
Myntra.com – Wrangler
themarketingblog.wordpress.com 
Hello webmaster
I would like to share with you a link to your site
write me here preonrelt@mail.ru
Bro, just check out riya.com or else polarrose.com..
They are such sites on web3.0 which are into B2B businesses.
Viral – Thanks for adding your voice to the conversation
Sampad – I guess this is for the first time that u’ve dropped a comment 🙂 I’m glad to echoed your thoughts with the Indian version of your post !
Mrinal – Yeah ! touch-and-feel is something which ‘online retail’ has to address. I’ve personally found out Myntra.com to be fairly good except for the size.
Girish – Yep! Its win-win situation for customers with so many players coming in. As mentioned here, it would be interesting to see how many strive in the competition 🙂
At least this is good for end customer where so many players are coming in to the market, which will bring price down. I am based in Mumbai and came to know about pringoo from one of my friend. Actually I have a t-shirt from myntra and when my friend saw that he told me about pringoo. I placed order from pringoo for full sleeve red/white t-shirt. And got t-shirt in 3 days, that was impressive.
About quality of t-shirt and printing, it goes beyond myntra half sleeve wrangler t-shirt. I found pringoo’s t-shirt is soft and has great fitting. Fabric is relatively better than myntra’s wrangler t-shirt. As they requested for feedback so I got a chance to talk to them over phone and came to know that they get their t-shirt from same manufacturing company and from same t-shirt lot which get exported to GAP and Banana Republic in US. Pringoo just use its own branding on given t-shirt instead of GAP or BR branding.
Only one thing which I expect from pringoo is adding calendar and greeting cards in their product range.
Good to see so many names mentioned out here. I knew only about Myntra and Webvastra and its surprising to see so many other players are there too!
There is one problem with this whole business model though. Consumers in India would like to touch and feel the products before they buy it and it’s extremely difficult to judge the quality of t-shirts until you receive them. I have ordered from both Webvastra and Myntra and thankfully, both qualities were decent. Myntra was a step ahead since it supplies Wrangler t-shirts only, guess that explains the steep price tag (It was 350 not 450) if I remember correctly.
Let’s wait and watch how many of these survive, everyone cannot become a cafepress 🙂
Few months back I wrote a post in my blog @ http://tinyurl.com/27addo about online t-shirt business in US and how Indian companies (I mean the major business houses) can use this simple yet relevant way to promote their brand or you can say its a better PR tool.
Yet Good to see that so many Indian start-ups have come along the way. I’m sure this segment will grow for sure in the coming months since the youth nowadays are finding more interesting stuff online than offline.
Nice post.
Cheers!
Yes Daksh, Its an interesting article. With the imergence of startup companies in India which are more directed towards internet domain, the business and social networking in Web 3.0 is becoming an extensive platform for the Country’s development. With a more knowhow on the various B2B solutions and B2C solutions, even a common people can ease themself for the purchasing activities and that too in a customizable manner.
Great Article !