due to my past ceo duties (ceerius apparel), i still keep up...

due to my past ceo duties (ceerius apparel), i still keep up with the clothing blogs, tee-shirt companies and the industry as a whole. while reading one such clothing blog, i came across the ad above that linked here.  

“tweets on tees. awesome.” — yeah, i’m not too sure.

threadless is a great story – community forum/blog discussing design, turned business by way of ranking design submissions and then printing/selling the highest rated. completely different approach to selling a tee shirt as inventory was almost guaranteed to be sold out, as people voted the design highly, why wouldn’t they subsequently buy the finished item? threadless then started paying for winning submissions, running contests… it was quite impressive. but this whole “tweets on tees” thing has me scratching my head.

as i understand it, anyone can tweet something for inclusion, and those tweets that get re-tweeted the most will appear on a tee shirt that potentially gets printed/sold. i can’t figure out who would want a tee shirt with someone’s tweet on it. just doesn’t make sense to me. i think it could be a fantastic way for threadless to use twitter, just not in this exact way. maybe allow twitter users to tweet about their favorite design on threadless, and not necessarily require site membership to place a vote. that’s a good way of embracing another form of technology/social media for the purpose of growing your business. or having a contest, as threadless does so often, with all forms of voting done strictly by tweeting.

i’ve seen some pretty inventive uses of twitter recently, and this just isn’t one of them.