The guys over at Cameesa.com have developed an almost fail safe way of producing and selling t-shirts. All of the t-shirt competition sites like pioneer, Threadless, are taking advantage of crowdsourcing for their designs. They are asking the artists and designers of the world to design t-shirts, comment and vote on them. With this information they then choose which t-shirts to print. They can gauge how many they will sell based on the attention the design gets before it’s printed. Mistakes must happen though because t-shirts are printed that are not popular as can be evidenced from how speedily they sell or don’t sell and also by the hugely discounted sales prices when these companies try to clear their stock.

Cameesa’s model also uses crowdfunding which basically forces you to buy a t-shirt if you want to vote for it thus eliminating the opinions of those who simply like the design and wouldn’t be interested in buying it. The voting is not really voting it is supporting or funding the t-shirt. If enough people fund a particular t-shirt it will be printed and not only will they receive a t-shirt they will also receive a 3 cent commission for every t-shirt (or part as they call it) that you purchase. I know 3 cents isn’t much but imagine they sell 500 t-shirts with that design then you will receive $15 meaning that the t-shirt that you wanted really only cost you $5 (including shipping). Not a bad deal but you may have to be patient and there is of course no guarantee that the t-shirt will be printed.

For the designer the benefits are even better of course. They will receive a $500 prize once the tee is printed and $2 per tee for every tee over 250 they sell as well as a free tee. It is a pretty fair prize as far as the competitions go.

So far there are only 5 t-shirts in their store, the latest being a very stylish and subtle number called the Vinyl Lounge which you can see below. And it looks like there is another one about to be 100% supported soon.