"Because we’re in this transition period between PHP and Ruby, we couldn’t use PostgreSQL on Heroku because PHP doesn’t speak PostgreSQL."<p>sigh
A friend and I built a t-shirt site too. It's so incredibly basic (ours is ugly) but was fun to do to actually write some software for the web (we arent really web guys).<p>The code is actually really cool because we never have to touch a shirt. Shirts.io handles all the t-shirt fulfillment, stripe handles payments, and we design shirts and add them to the site. If you don't have a t-shirt company, you should, just because it's cool to write a program that turns your own money into tshirts.<p>The site I made was www.binarytees.in
I thought this was going to be a joke post along the lines of "disrupt threadmaking" -> "disrupt sewing machines" -> "disrupt sweatshop labor issues" -> "disrupt textile design and manufacturing process cycle" -> "disrupt fashion industry" -> "disrupt ecommerce" -> "disrupt logistics"
Why don't you allow single orders? I always thought you required 10+ shirts because you had to create some sort of mold and load it into the printers, but it seems that isn't the case.<p>With everything automated, you could easily allow anyone to create any number of shirts.
Great write up and insights into Teespring's history, current stack and workflow, really fun read! Awesome to learn from others tribulations, especially enjoyed reading about their solution to getting correct postal addresses, and the tech they used to do so.
Why would you want to redo in Ruby and Rails if the current solution is working fine in php? Are there significant benefits? You could significantly improve upon and/or add to the current system/application instead of rewriting, no?
The url to Teespring in the header is broken:<p>"Editor’s note: Evan Stites-Clayton is Co-Founder at Teespring. Eric Koslow is Lead Developer at Teespring."<p>=> h<a href="http://www.teespring.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.teespring.com/</a>
I've been building a t-shirt website at <a href="http://electricfairground.com" rel="nofollow">http://electricfairground.com</a> so this article was a really interesting read.<p>How long did it take you guys to get traction?
Nice article, I had went through a few phone calls with Evan early this year about coming on board as a developer. I really like what these guys are doing.<p>Good job Evan and Walker.
CustomInk.com is worth looking at as a comparison - similar approach started 10+ years ago, now apparently selling several hundred million dollars of T-shirts.