Here’s a business that it is intriguing. It sells T-shirts. Ok, so what’s so new about that I hear you ask! What makes it unique is that the T-shirts are designed by customers. The T-shirt designs are then voted on by customers and the winning designs are printed up. Customers then buy the T-shirts. They can even photograph themselves wearing the T-shirt and send it into the website for inclusion on their pages.If you are really interested, you can even browse the designs by designer. The designer page contains a profile of the designer as well as links to his other designs. Thus, promoting browsing across the site and building an added dimension to the interaction. I think this appeals to the “story” aspect of the product.
And when you get your T-shirt, the label is printed onto the shirt itself with it’s title and the name of the designer. Again, promoting a depth to the product that would otherwise be missing. Does this count as user generated content? MMmmm
Here’s another cool idea that I liked. Little Miss Matched sells 3 single mismatched socks in a box. Yep, that’s right, 3 socks in a box. In fact, they have branched out and sell all sorts of
mismatched stuff. Nothing for blokes though. They have franchises in the UK and have just won a big deal with Macy’s in the US as well as raising $17M in funding. I thought the mismatched tights were funny – although you could make up your own mismatched socks (just take one from two separate pairs), this was going to be hard to do with tights (unless they were made that way!).And here’s another example... Nike has launched a service to enable consumers to design their own trainers based on pictures taken using a camera phone. The PhotoiD service encourages consumers to take a picture of any subject using their camera phone, which is then sent via MMS to a short code. A personalised picture of a trainer is sent back which features the predominant colours of the photo. The message comes with a unique code which can be entered into the Nike website to buy a...you guessed it – a pair of trainers.
