By: Deborah Johnson Wood
Joe Pohlen, the third place winner of the recent Idea Pitch Competition, and his partner, Dan Tasman, have invested nearly $30,000 of their own money in their new online clothing design business. The two GVSU students are counting on mass customization to help make the business successful.
At Dormtshirts.com, students who want to get their original designs on a shirt can upload a digital file to the site's design lab and print it on a T-shirt or sweatshirt—and, if the design is popular, they can make some money off it.
The site provides an email link that the student can send to friends, encouraging them to vote for the design. Every week, the design with the most votes becomes available for sale and the designer gets 10 percent of the sales.
And this is where the mass customization comes in. Pohlen and Tasman will print an order for one shirt or an order for 10,000 shirts.
"There's brand new technology, the AnaJet Direct to Garment machine, which allows us to print shirts without any screens and at a higher quality than the competition," Pohlen says. "We use water based inks which feel better on the skin and create a sharper image."
The site goes live November 3. Over the next year, the focus will be on gaining notoriety and building the web site to 15,000 members. In five years, the hope is that the site will be at full capacity and printing about 1,000 shirts a day.
"I've been printing shirts since I was a sophomore in high school," Pohlen says. "Everyone kept coming to me with design ideas and I had no idea how to get them printed and do it profitably until this web site."
Source: Joe Pohlen, Dormtshirts.com
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Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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