One of the less tech-centric startups at EmergingTalk 2011 was Squeeze My Tees (video below, thanks eruscitto for the tip). After briefly meeting with co-founders Tory Gentes (COO) and Brian Weinreich (CTO) my thought was their concept hedges on the possibility to produce t-shirts that go viral.
The appropriately timed release of t-shirts in response to major social events is an emerging market given how social media has accelerated the rate of real-world memes over the past six years. With the ability to penetrate various social networks very quickly, and on numerous occasions from different entry points, especially among millions of highly connected high school and college students – a market has opened. I do not see another t-shirt company who has addressed this market as effectively as it could be addressed.
Major rounds of financing have been poured into business models that rely on heavily decentralized networks, and tap into the viral nature of social media to reach a large consumer base. GroupOn and LivingSocial, though in the same space as each other, provide the best example of startups who have received ridiculously large sums of investment capital this year to grow less tech-centric startups. What this means is investors have started to look more closely at startups that know how to scale this class of operations to attract high-volume sales through social media outlets. Now if SMT could only use the group buying model to drive the sale of viral t-shirts. That is one business relationship waiting to develop to enable SMT to scale.
SMT has a proprietary technology to help spot social media trends, however, it is unclear how much emphasis they should apply to develop the technology further. A lot of other trending analysis tools already exist and for some companies this is the only product they work on. So chances are SMT will have to choose which aspect of their business to focus on more heavily. The interesting algorithm to sift social media data (which to be competitive demands a small army of programmers) or the use of existing trend analysis tools along with the good word of targeted human input from college representatives to identify memes that lend the chance to create viral t-shirts.
We look forward to watching the company grow. You can follow SMT on Twitter.
