Review: Teextile T-Shirt

The nice folk at Teextile were kind enough to send us a t-shirt to review and they even let us choose the shirt. Mrs. Retro chose a very cute number by Brazilian designer BrunoMota aka aka ObrunoMota. It is a light blue American Apparel with a perfect print that looks just like it did on the site. BrunoMota’s illustrations are clean and beautiful.

I hope that you don’t fall in love with this shirt and I probably should have mentioned this earlier but it is no longer for sale. Shirts at Teextile are only on sale for one week I believe, which is a big improvement from the original idea of one t-shirt one day. So think of this review as a review of the service provided by Teextile rather than of this particular shirt. The shirt arrived in an A4 sized plastic envelope that is transparent on one side so we could see the t-shirt right away…very cool.

On the inside neck of the t-shirt you will also find the Teextile logo and I love it. Too man of these companies are overdoing it, some even putting their big logos on the outside (Springleap may have been the worst offender) but this is subtle and stylish and adds a little bit to the tee.

Anyway, I would definitely recommend checking out Teextile. They have so far been selling some great designs and this week is no exception. In fact this weeks selection is one of my favorites and if you like the style of this t-shirt you will be happy to know that there is a another BrunoMota t-shirt on sale today. If you buy it today it will be $12 and $15 throughout the week. If you are into robots, Thursday’s tee really rocks.

5 New Tees from Teextile

Teextile is a new t-shirt competition site a la Threadless. It has a pretty slick design and has attracted some good designers. It seems to have attracted the same designers as all the other sites though which I will illustrate a little bit later. Anyway, in just over eight hours they will release their first shirt and one shirt per day after that. On their home page you can see what the next five shirts will look like. You can also keep reading this post.

Designers get $4 per every shirt sold which is decent enough and they get to keep the rights to their design. This is a growing trend among the new t-shirt contest sites which is attractive for designers. The tees are only on sale for one day though so don’t expect to become rich. You can submit your design to some other sites when you are finished or perhaps sell it yourself on a POD like Cafepress or Zazzle.

The first shirt to go on sale is a pretty decently designed tee but while it doesn’t use the Teextile logo per se, I think it is fair to describe it as a logo tee. I imagine the demand will be pretty low.

Tuesday’s t-shirt is a pretty sweet Rasputin t-shirt by Castle. It’s very dark and a little scary. I think there is a big market for this kind of design. Castle is a well known in the t-shirt contest arena and I recognized this image immediately. It is a reworking of or an alternative version of a shirt previously submitted to Design by Humans. You can compare them below. I’m guessing he had to shrink the print area for Teextile which may not do the all over printing that you can find on DBH.

I admit that I didn’t recognize the following t-shirt but it didn’t even take me a minute to find that it had previously been submitted to laFraise, a European t-shirt contest site that is run by Spreadshirt. The coloring has been changed a little even if the overall design is the same. I like the new coloring more, the red of the LaFraise version reminds me of something that I will probably never discuss on the T-Shirt Review.

Thursday’s shirt is also from a well known designer, BrunoMota (Obrunomota) and he had already submitted this design to Brazillian t-shirt contest site, Camisteria and Threadless. They seem to be identical designs. It is very solid illustration with clean lines.  Is is not something I want on my t-shirt but I think that many would like it.

And the final t-shirt is called “I want to dance too” by RecycledWax and I also remembered seeing it before. It is a very cute design and I had seen it when it was a Design by Humans submission.

Looking at this new site Teextile I’m afraid that I have to say that there is nothing new to report. The same designs from the same popular designers. I hope they can do better than this in the future and I don’t mean any disrespect but it is literally more of the same at the moment. I admit that it is great for those designers to have another source of income but I don’t think it has anything special to offer the customers.

This situation reminds me of another fairly new t-shirt contest site called Ink-Hound. They have a very similar system and they also seem to have nothing new to offer. I followed them for quite a while but it seems like just a few designers win the majority of the prizes and these are designers that are already popular at other sites. 11 out of 22, a cool 50% of the wins are by just 4 designers. I lost interest quickly. I hope this doesn’t happen to Teextile too.