Temptation from our sponsors...
Temptation from our sponsors...
On March 5, ShirtFight will open its doors and become the newest addition to the growing list of T-Shirt design competition sites. But what makes them different? What will set them apart from the endless number of Threadless clones? Well, I was fortunate enough to chat (we spent about an hour on instant message) with the founders of ShirtFight, Jud and Marieta Chapman. But don’t call them by their real names! They’ve got slick Internet monikers (who doesn’t!) and prefer that you call them Miss Etti and El Presidente. Yes, they are a crazy pair!
This will be a two part post, and in the first part you’ll get to learn what ShirtFight is all about, get to know Miss Etti and El Presidente a bit and see the extravagant formula they’ve come up with for choosing winners! In part two we’ll take a look at ShirtFight’s terms of service and what prizes designers can expect to win. We’ll even give you a sneak peek of their launch designs!
Coty: Hey man, how’s it going?
ShirtFight: BUSY! 
but doing pretty darn good…tomorrow is friday after all!
Coty: Friday!
ShirtFight: There’s a bottle of rum and some limes with my name on it!
Coty: oh yummy, I’m a tequila guy myself!
ShirtFight: Ya I love me some tequila…it makes me take my pants off in public though. There was this one time in Atlanta….
Coty: LOL. So are you guys ready for the big launch?! Been running on fast food the last few weeks?
ShirtFight: You know, it’s one of those things that you try and try to prepare for, and there’s always something that pops up. We have whiteboards FILLED with punch lists, crossing them off one by one. But yes, I think we’re pretty darn ready
Coty: March 5 is creeping up. What are some last minute things you guys are working on?
ShirtFight: Lots and lots of testing mainly, to make sure that nothing blows up when we open it up to the public. I’m sure something is going to blow up…that’s just how things go But fun-wise, we’ve been putting some final touches on our photo studio and product photos. You will get a kick out of how we display the product, it’s very “different” than the other sites!
Coty: Cool – so mostly website related stuff.
ShirtFight: Oh yeah it’s all website…that and getting the word out to the designers about our first Shirt Fight (that’s what we call our weekly themed competitions).
Coty: So these weekly themed competitions is part of the 5 step plan to taking down the Threadless empire?! I kid! Tell us a little bit about how these weekly competitions will work.
ShirtFight: Hahaha you know we all have our pipe dreams…Threadless is a great site, if we grow as big as them, yet still keep the site heavily focused on showcasing the talents of the artists…we’d be happy campers. Ok so the weekly competitions…We wanted to put some fun into our site. So many of the t-shirt competitions sites out there are cookie-cutter…submit a design, wait for a certain period of time, hope your design wins, get paid….kinda boring if you ask me. So to spice things up we do weekly themes, and we’re going to do our best to keep those themes unique, interesting, and “inspiring” to the artists’ creativity.
Coty: Very true. They all follow the same model.
ShirtFight: We start a new Shirt Fight every Thursday at midnight, and voting lasts for exactly one week.
Coty: Will the winners be chosen purely on votes? Or will the ShirtFight team have finally say ala Threadless/DBH?
ShirtFight: For every vote a submission gets, we print out a color copy of it and throw it on our office floor. Then using the quasi-Monte Carlo method of nonrandom statistical sampling, we then extrapolate the average mean (based on low-discrepancy sequences of course), and using the law of the iterated logarithm we apply the data against a Fibonacci sequence, integrate from 0 to infinity, and then perform a root mean analysis using these equations:
And then our brains explode and we have to have a drink. After we’re nice and tipsy, we look at the quality of the designs, the overall voting numbers, and the comments to determine the winner!
Coty: Miss Etti, cute name – so what’s your cutesy name going to be…Jud will not do.
ShirtFight: Ah, I’m “El Presidente”! It’s like a tuxedo t-shirt…I’m formal, but here to party 
Coty: Oh fancy!
ShirtFight: I sometimes wear a faux mustache tattoo to complete the persona.
Coty: But do you have the ego to go with such a name! So, I heard that you guys got a lot of input from t-shirt designers. Who are some of the guys you talked to?
ShirtFight: I have more of an “extrovert” personality, so I like to walk around going “I’M EL PRESIDENTE AROUND HERE!”…no one ever takes me seriously though 
We talked to several designers that have won on other competition sites, to see what they liked and didn’t like about their experiences. There’s always room to build a better mousetrap. When we launch, we won’t be perfect…but the hope is that we’ve raised the bar when it comes to focusing on the artists. Our #1 goal is to help artists get tons more eyeballs on their artwork…selling t-shirts is a much lower priority for us. When you really enjoy what you do (like rubbing elbows and shooting the shit with designers), the rest will follow suit.
Coty: Awesome, you guys will have to find a balance though since you need to sell tees to keep the site self sustainable. OK, no more than 21 tees being sold at a time. Whose idea was that and how’d you come up with the number 21? You’re from Chicago – 23 should have been the number! As in the number of the greatest basketball player that ever lived. Ever!
ShirtFight: It was actually Miss Etti’s idea. Her thinking was that instead of having hundreds and hundreds of t-shirts on a site, we would focus on keeping only a select number of “champions” on the site. We are a competition site after all, just because you win one week doesn’t make you a champ. Michael Jordan isn’t a household name because he did great in one game, am I right? The number 21 just felt like a good number…plus it fits nicely on a site (1 feature on top, 20 shirts underneath).
Coty: Absolutely. So you guys want to keep things fresh, keep the tees moving and make sure the designers get their time to shine!
ShirtFight: You got it! You never know when an underdog is going to come in and just clean everyone’s clocks! They deserve their time in the spotlight!
For more information on ShirtFight, be sure to check out their site and sign up for their newsletter for a head start on the first of many weekly competitions!
Coty Gonzales is a dude from Hawaii that loves awesome tees. He blogs daily about tees and hosts a t-shirt review show. For more information about Coty be sure to check out his website!
