PleaseDressMe, a new t-shirt search engine.

I've seen a few of these t-shirt search engines around the web lately -- the idea is to use keyword tags to browse t-shirt designs from multiple vendors. Of the several sites I've peeked at this week, PleaseDressMe yielded the most results I'd actually buy on geek-themed search strings like "robot," "hacker," or "Star Wars," excerpted above. At far left is a great 8-bittish "Saddest Soldier" tee recently launched by R. Stevens of Diesel Sweeties. This search engine did fail on a search for "goatse," but dude, cmon: you don't want to be walking around in a goatse t-shirt anyhow. Continuing in the theme of an earlier Boing Boing post today -- the "typography" tee tag on this site yields some fun results. A little background on these guys: one of the founders is Gary Vaynerchuk of the popular wine-themed videocast Wine Library TV; another is Gary's brother AJ; and another co-founder is the lead architect at Digg.

PleaseDressMe

• [nnguyen]

  I have this goatse shirt: http://www.threadless.com/product/235/Goatse

  And I wear it everywhere.

• [MitchSchaft]

  No Cannibal Corpse either :(

• [Pipenta]

  This was kind of feeble, I’m afraid.

• [shirtseek]

  Hmm, might one of those sites you’ve peeked at be shirtseek.com? If not, you really owe it to yourself to go there.

  While it may lack the Web 2.0 flair of pleasedressme, or the (temporary) quantity advantage of teenormous, shirtseek makes up for it in accessibility and user generated content by allowing t-shirt designers, or even average joe users, to submit, rate, and discuss the shirts on the site. If “PDM” is the supposed “Google of T-Shirts”, then shirtseek is Digg.

  At least I think so, but then again, it’s my site ;-)

  -Paul

• [overton36531]

  zolo very good

• [sandieman]

  Great people, beautiful design, awesome name, powerful functionality = GREAT SITE.

  Great find!

• [mistervega]

  great idea with not-so-great results (literally). anyone with moderate search engine skills can find much more on their own. i’m curious if this is based on only select tee-commerce sites.

• [DRayMorton]

  Lifehacker ran a post on PleaseDressMe last week and someone in the comments mentioned teenormous.com as a superior index for shirts. Other comments had links to some of the better shirt sites out there.

  I agree with TomA above: better band shirt indexing is needed.

• [Candy Addict]

  Let’s compare:
  Robot: PDM has 27 results. Robot search at Teenormous.com – 46 results. A few are children’s so hit the filter to only show adult: 42 results at Teenormous.com.

  Hacker: PDM has 4 results. Teenormous.com has 17 (14 if you filter it down to adult male).

  Star Wars search: PDM has 31 tees. Teenormous.com has 53.

  Teenormous launched 3 days before PDM, has much more t-shirts indexed 15,000 vs PDM’s 4000, and the Teenormous search is much more sophisticated.

  Yes, PDM looks more Web 2.0, but Teenormous is a better search engine (IMO).

• [moniker42]

  Jardin, just because YOU don’t want to walk around with a Goatse shirt on…

  Just don’t speak for the crowd, you feel me?

• [Foolster41]

  Cool idea. I never heard of either T-shirt search site, and I’m going to have to look at both.

• [Candy Addict]

  Oh yeah – someone above said “search for the beatles yielded only three results at PDM. Pink Floyd yielded 24 at PDM

  Teenormous: 57 Beatles tees. 35 Pink Floyd.

• [Toma]

  MisterVega: Agreed. Great concept, great design, less than stellar execution. A search for “the beatles” yielded only three results. “Pink Floyd” yielded 24 and “The Doors” got 277 – though few of those results had anything to do with the bands in question. “The Velvet Underground” got 0 results, which I found a little surprising.

  Geek tees are great, but the support for band tees – which are pretty huge – is lacking. That being said: can’t wait to see how it improves in the coming months.

• [i_prefer_yeti]

  Yes, if you’re a company that makes tees, you have to offer an affiliate program in order to be included in their search engine.

  Makes sense, they want to get paid.

• [Xeni Jardin]

  @moniker42 did I say goatse? I meant goats.

• [sergetheconcierge]

  I checked the site after Gary V mentioned its launch on Twitter.
  Since ‘Moose Hunting’ was in the news I did a test search on the topic and one of the results of the search was accurate…
  More details in Going to a Moose Hunting Party: Please Dress Me helps you find the right Tees on Serge the Concierge.

  Take care

  Serge
  ‘The French Guy from New Jersey’

• [Jamie Sue]

  “doctor who” yielded no applicable results. British Sci-fi geek fail for you Please Dress Me.

• [Anonymous]

  All of these t-shirt search engine sites are good. They all have their positives and negatives and none of them are perfect. But all to me are better than just randomly hitting google search. Here are the ones I have found and used.

  Teenormous
  Pleasedress.me
  Search4tshirts.om
  Go2tshirts.com
  Shirtseek.com
  Teeshirtdrama.com

  Good work out of all these sites. They are addicting to just browse shirts too

• [moniker42]

  @Jardin I dunno, ‘Republicans for Voldemort’ always had a nice ring to it.