The Tee Tube

Goyal,who is visibly delighted at the prospects,says,“Our USP is customer obsession. We wanted our products to be a mass product,hence the prices are low. We have maintained high quality though.”

The duo is just one example. Mumbai-based apparel outfit Redwolf,Chennai-based Kultwear and even Pune-based SheepStop are all working with the same business sense. What’s more,they are finding takers all along. Started by Ameya Thakur,Vivek Malhotra and Rahul Jaisheel in 2012,Redwolf has developed a steady following across the country. “E-commerce has terrific potential and with marketing on social networking websites the reach now is far greater,” says Jaisheel. Thakur says he always wanted to start a T-shirt company because he couldn’t find stuff that he liked. “The big brands were always too expensive and the alternative was tacky mass produced tees with pseudo-funny one liners,” he says.

The most popular T-shirts that they retail are of television shows such as The Big Bang Theory,How I Met Your Mother,Sherlock,Dexter,Game of Thrones,Friends and Seinfeld. Among filmi T-shirts,the common ones are Ironman,Avengers,The Hulk,Batman and Superman. Best selling quotes include: “I am Sher Locked”,“Bazinga”,“Challenge Accepted”,“Suit Up” and “War is Coming”.

While treading a thin line of violating copyright infringement,Goyal says their concept is different. “The Ironman design is copyrighted by Marvel,but the arc reactor design is not. Our designs are based more on quotations,one-liners and funny illustrations symbolising the character. It is the only way to keep the pieces affordable,” he adds.

Bhagyashri Dixit,who founded SheepStop,says that they work through crowdsourcing of designs. “We do comic characters depending on how popular the design is amongst our customers,” she says.

Jaisheel says that getting customers involved in the designing process helps to expand the fan base in the country. “We now have a wolfpack of 12,630 customers and counting. We do an average of 50-60 T-shirts a day and all this is because of getting customers involved too,” he says.