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)

Funny math and science tees

We went through our entire site and picked out the best math and science t-shirts we could find. We found 41 great science tees and 27 funny math tees.

Take a look at the lists and let us know what you think.

• 27 Funny Math T-shirts
• 41 Funny Science T-shirts

Halo 3 Long Sleeve T-shirt, Fashion Advice, and Sheldon

Recently a visitor asked:

how come nobody thinks about the people that live up north we prefer to have long sleeve tees with a picture of halo 3 and a picture of the halo spartan and would be nice on a long sleeve henely, do you make special orders or do you know where i can write to find a long tee with the spartan and halo 3 pictures on it would look nice on black and army green,thanks Signed Max

We replied with:

We don’t make t-shirts, we are a t-shirt search engine and just point you to merchants that sell t-shirts. I don’t think there are any Halo 3 long sleeve t-shirts in our directory. I found a Halo 2 long sleeve though. It is from Stylin Online and they are super cool so you might try asking them about a Halo 3 long sleeve. They get lots of new t-shirts all the time.

Another thing you could do is get a short sleeve shirt you like and wear a long-sleeve tee under it – modeled here by Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory (which is an awesome show, BTW):

[image from Buddytv]

Yes, now we’re giving fashion advice. What next? :)

Ban T-shirts, Conch Tees, and Southern Brand

Just did an update to the site and while doing it we added 3 new merchants:

Ban T-shirts
Ban is full of some great political and (anti) religious t-shirts. If you’re looking to make a statement, check out Ban T-shirts. They’re also made in the USA, sweatshop free, and organic cotton!

Conch Tees
Conch Tees specializes in funny t-shirts: from political to politically incorrect.

Southern Brand
Southern Brand tees feature classic design tenets of the south and images of rural Americana including noble critters, roadside BBQ shacks, the blues highway, old wooden letterpress show posters and phrases born of tradition, hard work and good livin’.

The winning has begun!

We chose some winners tonight for the free t-shirt giveaway. Two Twitterers (here and here) and three blog entries have won. Still plenty of time to enter and plenty more free t-shirts left!