Shirt.woot's founder Joel departs for a non-shirt.woot gig
32Joel Lewis has made an official departure from shirt.woot after founding the dot-woot shirt design concept (with me and @dave @shawn @lukeduff and many other hands in the mix) 10 years ago. Shirt.woot was Woot’s second community concept site launched in 2007. Since I just did a 10 year’s ago post about wine.woot, my nostalgia-capacity hasn’t quite rebounded to full strength but there’s a ton of y’all that appreciate Joel’s efforts and his leaving is eventful. I hope that we can fill in some stories from our memories as we have time over the coming weeks. Joel added an incredible passion and creative energy to our glory days at woot. I remember and smile on a weekly basis when looking through my closet at the hundreds of shirts I still own.
I’ll start the reminiscing actually with a project Joel made at Woot before shirt.woot launched:
I still remember the conversation Joel started with “So this is going to sound weird but I need your permission to hire an actual monkey for $500”. To which I replied “I’m going to approve this request without hearing a single detail.” and the Joel Lewis contribution era to Woot was off and running.
So here’s the drill again. Did you try out shirt.woot? When did you buy your first shirt? What’s your favorite classic Woot shirt? How many do you think you own? Did you enjoy the community that formed there?
Thanks Joel
/giphy cheers
- 44 comments, 57 replies
- Comment
Ummmm …
@narfcake you seem to be hoarding the shirts
@narfcake I think I see “The Binge” up near the top, 2nd from right…
@communist
@narfcake won’t let anyone else get one unless he’s distracted.
I have drawers full of Woot shirts. I have two randoms on order right now. I spent way too much time and money with their crazy Krampus egg thing. Last week a guy at Chick-fil-a asked me if I played Dungeons and Dragons and I didn’t even know that’s what was on the shirt I was wearing. You learn something new every day.
The money. The horror. The money. The horror. Thx Joel!
/giphy too many shirts
@f00l
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/Smarf L’Héroïque
@narfcake
I hadn’t seen that one.
Must
Have
Must Have
MustHave
GottaGoBeBackInAMinute
I currently own zero woot shirts, but I’ve purchased a few over the years. I sent a Woodchuck shirt off to a friend who uses that as a pseudonym, as did another friend. I got the original monkey shirt (from before the launch, as I recall), and treasured it for many years. It went off to a friend’s daughter, who was thrilled to have it (no accounting for tastes).
http://www.woot.com/offers/size-xx-large-be-the-screaming-monkey-a-woot-tee
Every shirt I’ve purchased (or been given) ended up that way, but it’s nice to think that they’ve brought joy to others.
You know, that Woodchuck’s a fine looking fellow:
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/meet-the-woodchuck
@Shrdlu
I make self stop buying them, cause then I cherish them and think they’re too precious to wear or something.
@narfcake, how to you balance the hoarding/using dichotomy?
@f00l What balance?! Some shirts get disproportionately worn a lot more than others.
Those two copies aside, a third copy also has holes already and I’ve cut two mutant Anvils into tanks.
I do have spares on AA, though!
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/nocturnowl
My very first woot purchase ever was a shirt. Friends are Forever - It just spoke to me in it’s random disturbing way. I probably own about 15 shirts from woot, many of which have rather twisted themes. No idea which one is my favorite but I do have an affinity for this one: I Just Call it Housekeeping
My first shirt was the flying monkey shirt. But I think this came out before shirt.woot? Or am I wrong?
@ELUNO You are not (in this rare instance) wrong. It’s the shirt I linked to above. I think the shirt.woot launch came shortly after it.
@Shrdlu Hooray! I’m finally not wrong! But I did miss your post so it is basically a repost in which case I am wrong again… :’(
Shirt.woot had some fun ones, particularly the stuff that came out of the derby. Not sure if I ever purchased any. I kept almost buying tees and then realizing that the pun only worked when you had the shirt title.
I can’t find a picture of it, but my favorite of those shirts was titled “Kneel before sod”
@MrGlass this?
@Perkalicious No, it was a guy kneeling on the ground next to a patch of grass.
@MrGlass that’s definitely more like what I was expecting to find in searching for the shirt. I also got no hits even when I specified “-zod +sod”
@MrGlass Found a shirt at TeePublic that matches your description.
@gio Same joke, but the woot shirt didnt have the words on it. Thats why it only made sense when you told someone the shirt title.
@MrGlass
I did read what you said about it not making sense without a title, and then promptly forgot that was your the point.
@narfcake Maybe you can shed some light on how/why shirts disappear from the catalog. Can artists pull their design after a certain amount of time? Or are they all still there, but with such esoteric names that they can’t be found via a simple search?
@gio Some designs do have contract-based availability. Some are limited availability due to special inks used (metallic, GITD, etc), or more rare blank color (purple, for example).
But most live on. Sometimes at-the-time clever naming (I may be guilty of this) can make a design hard to find. The keyword searches are not bad however, I couldn’t find it either.
@gio What @ACraigL says. Designs that were under the “A-contract” for dailies or “C-contract” for derbies do not enter the back catalog and printing rights return to the artist after a year.
@gio To elaborate a little, examples of C-contract shirts can be found here at one of the Mentions of Honors side sales.
None of these are in the back catalog and the printing rights have since reverted back to the artist.
@ACraigL @narfcake Thanks for the information. I only pop into shirt.woot occasionally to look at a featured design or make a requested vote, so I miss a lot of the background details that get discussed. That said, I still find it interesting to know how things work.
@gio Voting request, you say?
@ACraigL
@gio Whee! Thanks!
I’ll tell you what, Joel set the bar really high back in the day (on Luna Road). He never got tangled up with the rapid growth rate or high volume that he woke up to everyday. Shined with little direction but also seemed very manageable. And even after all these years, all of these things are still true about his glorious hair.
@travis king of the boc has spoken. hear hear
Ah…Good ol’ Shirt.Woot. Where would my life, and bank account, be without you? I still remember my first purchase from Woot was in fact a Shirt.Woot shirt. It was called Cool Breeze and was a gift for my wife. (Wow! That was almost ten years ago!) From there the floodgates opened as well as my wallet to the awesomeness that was Shirt.Woot. While I was hospitalized and recovering from my much needed liver transplant, I got a big ol’ box of shirts from the shirt.woot crew and I still greatly appreciate it to this day. I think I was chasing Narfcake in terms of sheer number of woot shirts owned up until about two or three years ago when my wife basically said, “Enough is enough!” She made two shirt quilts for me out of some of them, but asked me to slow down the purchasing as our closet was bursting at the seems with shirts. Well…I still own about 50 that aren’t quilted, and I sold the rest to Narf, but I still love peaking in from time to time wanting to hit that “buy it now” button.
@bluejester
That quilting thing gives me cover to buy more shirts.
Not only do my husband and I have drawers ful, we bought them for our kids (cookie monster drunk on milk - my fav) as well.
Just 2 weeks ago I started going through the site to replace shirts that have seen better days
So sad, but yay for him.
@kayladnd
also heads this best shirt.woot shirt list at tshirtonomy (note links there have affiliate rev tags)
@kayladnd I thought it was less “drunk” and more “sugar crash.” Of course, there are six milk shot glasses… why didn’t I notice those before? I have two of this shirt!
I wonder if the milk is sour.
I loved the crap out of shirt.woot. For a good few years it compromised 80% of my wardrobe and I had a shirt for almost every occasion.
I’m embarrassed about the first shirt I bought there but F5 is my absolute favorite. Honorable mention goes to Risky Business that I re-bought later because it was stolen. I also always wore Overindulgence for BBQs. I also loved the Thundercats shirt mainly because it came out around the same time as the reboot which I loved.
Honestly there’s so many shirts I cherish and still keep around despite them no longer fitting me due to shrinkage. Shirt.woot was one of the last things keeping me at woot.
I have a ton, too many to count, of wootshirts, and that was way before I started designing. Being part of the artist community has given me much greater exposure to Joel and his team. They’re all great, supportive and super-helpful when I was total noob. Joel will be missed.
Blair Sayer’s beer label series is among my favorite shirts, but there really are to many homeruns to list all my regular wears.
i probably owned about 30-40 woot shirts. i got them when i was much heavier (went from 2XL down to a medium/large). so, i ended up donating the majority of them. there’s about 3-4 that i kept because i just couldn’t part with them.
i’d have to say my favorite shirt is this one. i have no idea why though. something about it just speaks to me.
@carl669 Wow! - a Ramy shirt in which the discussion thread was full of positivism! Granted, this was only his second design to print. He probably wouldn’t have been as successful over the years if it weren’t for the Streisand effect by his critics.
(I still kinda miss Adder’s rants, though.)
Too many favs to count. But if they just kept doing Nevermore in every possibly color and format, I’d prob just keep buying.
@f00l Friend of mine owns that, its a good one.
@f00l I was soooo happy when that thing was retired. Sick of seeing it. “Oh, I love poems that are in the shape of the animals they’re about. Look at me! I’m so hip and cool, man!” Blech.
@medz
Personally, I go for Post-Hip and Post-Cool.
Hip and Cool both abandoned me decades ago. They found me to be both unfaithful and unworthy, since I also hung with Total Dweeb a lot.
/giphy total dweeb
@f00l Pretty sure I saved good ol’ Nevermore from the Reckoning at least two separate times with last minute purchases for myself and family. I even bought one for my little girl a couple years ago when she was barely a few months old, and now she can actually fit in the thing!
I wore the raven to the edgar allen poe death annual event last year and during intermission met a really hot guy also wearing the raven. We met he bought me a raven beer and we had well a really great night together. Mmmm
The Binge, Nevermore, Reflections on Pi, & Questionable Table of Elements are probably my favorites. Also bought Gettysburg Address, Birth Of A Dragon, Books – No Electricity Required and others to give as gifts.
There are so many great designs!
Joel has been one of my dearest friends since the time he took me to see BEETHOVEN’S 2ND at the second-run cinema in, like, 1994. So I would probably say something nice about him here even if he hadn’t done such a great job overseeing the launch and development of my favorite Woot offshoot. Fortunately, he did. So I can just congratulate him on that, and not have to tax my powers of diplomacy.
@matthew
Did Beethoven’s 2nd ever make it onto a shirt? Would like.
Unlike everyone else here, I only have 5-10 shirts from shirt.woot.com (likely none from cat.shirt.woot @narfcake).
@dashcloud No catshirts?! You need to fix that.
http://shirt.woot.com/catalog?q=cat
@narfcake You can’t expect me to go through 500 catshirts- you need to narrow it down to at least 50!
@dashcloud It’s not 500.
@narfcake
/giphy technicality
I loved Joel in that one show with the trailer parks and such.
First shirt:
Touring with the Big G.
What was your first shirt?
There’s a shirt.woot?
@Ignorant How is it you managed to escape goatdom yet again?!
Twenty or so totes but half that many shirts. T-shirts don’t flatter me.
I was amused just looking at it again:
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/oh-the-places
Gorgeous:
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/growing-space
So me:
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/coffee-is-my-spirit-beverage
Favorite shirt:
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/at-at
@emilyap
I love the totes. Then I don’t use them in public cause afraid they’ll get dirty.
/giphy stupid
@f00l I forgot all about the totes. I own one, which is one of my favorite Woot purchases (outside all that wine):
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/threat-level-doctorow-tote
Better page and description (even if it’s just for the shirt, and not the tote):
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/threat-level-doctorow?ref=cnt_ctlg_dgn_0
I bought it partly because a portion of the money went to the EFF, and also because it was red.
@Shrdlu
ZOMG want want want that tote
@f00l That shirt link looks like you can do a print on demand. Maybe you can get the tote from there too. You can’t have mine, though.
@Shrdlu
The print-on-demand thing works I think only for shirts. I use that as an excuse to keep myself from spending an entire day picking out shirts and buying them.
Tell self “wait until they offer a tote on some special theme offering”.
First woot shirt I bought was on 11/18/2009. (around a month after joining woot) Apparently during a woot-off, so not really from shirt.woot.com. It was:
http://www.woot.com/offers/sore-thumbs-redux
Followed by:
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/its-a-trap
a few months later.
Went through a phase of buying tons of random shirts. Just donated a box of never-worn dumb shirts to Goodwill.
Lately, all I buy are random 3-packs for the kid. (annoys the wife to see her in stupid woot shirts) “That’s a sleep shirt. Not a school shirt!” lolz
Was definitely enjoyable working with Joel and having the first discussions with American Apparel to negotiate our costs. I was just a cog in the wheel, but I got someone on the phone who was quoting me maybe $12 or so “wholesale”. I then asked to be transferred to the “large order desk” and got Tabitha on the line. I forget the exact qty we cut the initial PO for, but I recollect it was for 50,000, maybe 100,000 blank shirts of various colors and sizes. We paid less than $12
Godspeed, Joel
@Jdub 100,000 shirts … so about 3 months worth? @jasontoon wrote this at the 7th month:
http://shirt.woot.com/blog/post/250-000-served-lies-damn-lies-and-shirtistics
@narfcake couldn’t call it 3 months worth as our initial order ended up being about a week’s worth of men’s L, XL, XXL…and about a year’s worth of women’s S. Took us a while to figure out the right mix of sizes, especially with AA running at least 1 size smaller than usual. Kind of a cluster, but Joel made the shi
t happen
Row vs Wade was my first shirt purchase, but it was for my wife. My actual first shirt was Music Pirate which I still have, wear and adore.
Also, I still hate the digital prints.
My first and still my favorite:
I think shirt.woot is where I first found “my” spot in the woot community. It’s also what got me into woot in the first place. My husband, then bf, wore woot shirts all the time. Then I got into them and we were off to the crap races!
I have several dozen woot shirts. I don’t wear them as much these days, though my woot tank tops are in heavy rotation.
Joel, if you read this random thread - thank you.
Nevermore was my first purchase and many shirt and sweatshirts later I have stopped buying for myself and now only buy as gifts.
I somehow managed to keep my Shirt.Woot collection to 6. Acquired in this order:
I’ve bought an irresponsible amount of woot shirts. People have complimented them constantly.
First one was back in August, 2007.
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/american-samurai
I still have it. Holding up well.
Since then, I dunno. Over the last 4-5 years, I haven’t bought as much, aside from 1 or 2 per year. It feels like a change towards more cute things and cats than clever designs.
@snapster TL;DR I need $500 to hire a monkey
@capguncowboy
$500 would be only get you half a monkey today due to rising monkey costs.
Perhaps you can borrow one from someone in the “relaxation” thread. Lots of monkeys getting spanked over there.
I think I purchased four woot shirts. Just recently purchased woot shirt tote bags for someone.
I have zero woot shirts and 4-5 meh/mediocre shirts.
I’m literally sitting here wearing this shirt: https://shirt.woot.com/offers/almost-human. Looks like I bought my first way back in 2007, but I was always disappointed in the move away from AA shirts and an overwhelming emphasis on cute designs, so I haven’t ordered from them for a couple of years. However, I still have a drawer full of shirts that are still holding up well!
As close as I can tell, I’ve bought 127 T-shirts, 5 Hoodies, 2 Random shirt packs, and 1 Tote. Around 20 or 25 of the total were gifts, but I still have enough shirts that my wife says to quit buying them (hasn’t stopped me.)
First shirt: Let’s Play by ramyb
Last shirt: Inner Child at Play by Mapinto
I have enjoyed them all. I have to say Shirt.woot has always been my favorite part of woot, it’s still where I look first and most often.
Joel, if you see this, Thanks for All the Shirts, and best of luck wherever you go.
So Long
It was the only place I bought T-shirts for probably the last half of the oughts. I got a lot of clever stuff out of randoms as well.
@djslack I’m glad someone got something good in the randoms. Tried once…I used them to paint in and made sure I got lots of paint on the chest area.
Bought 5 or 6 the first couple years but they seem to be focused on quantity now and not quality. Once in a great while, I see one that I like but most of the time, I don’t look at woot (any of it) except in passing. It’s become Amazon’s dumping ground for crap that they couldn’t get rid of otherwise. Haven’t bought from any woot sites in over two years. To be completely clear, I LOVE Amazon. I just don’t care for the crap work they do at woot.
@mydrivec The quality of the designs is subjective. One huge difference is that shirt.woot produces their items whereas the other woot subsites procures their items.
@narfcake Completely agree. Point taken. However, when I see 12 or more shirts offered simultaneously, I have to question the process? Feels more like a shotgun and hope we hit a market deal instead of say coming up with a truly one of a kind product.
There are a thousand shirt sites out there. I feel like shirt.woot used to be a special niche that I would follow, check feverishly hoping for one that was cared for, nurtured, and appealed to me. Now its just a chicken farm where they are all lined up crapping eggs. That is alright too but you need to make sure the eggs haven’t gone foul. Lots of rotten eggs now.
Add to that now I have to make the decision to figure out which company I want to make my shirt and differing sizing charts? What was once a joy is now work. Thanks but no.
Don’t even get me started about the price hike…haha feeling old and cranky as I write this. Shirts used to be 5 bucks in my day!
@mydrivec To each and everyone their own. Brand option … everybody’s body is different, and some folks complained because AA supports LGBT (neverminding that they’re probably using a phone and browser by a company also supportive, but that’s off topic here.) In any case, if the pre-2012 shirts fit, buy AA.
As for the price, NOPE. The dailies were $10. The randoms were $6.66. They were never $5 or less (until random Anvils came into play).
@narfcake I’m an auditor and I’m not that literal. I was aware of the price…very small attempt at humor.
Heck, with how well you get me, I should be designing shirts!
@TheChrisGlass @jakeline Regarding the shift towards cuteness and those who were crying foul that such dominated the derby, 6-1/2 years ago …
Offered on a day where a woot-off was occuring on the main site (meaning higher than usual traffic), the design was one of the lowest sellers in an era where 3k sellouts were common.
2 years later (so about 4-1/2 years ago), @llandar, who wasn’t exactly a fan either, wrote:
Looking back, it’s what Wooters wanted (voted for), and what Wooters bought. shirt.woot is a business, and they catered to it – just as the artists did too. And still do.
I realize that. Just a fact of life.
My first was the Reflections on Pi shirt, I think? Followed that by the procrastinators university shirt. Followed that by a spattering of shirts here and there, probably close to around 25-30 at this point, many of which have started to show their age. I still religiously buy Pi-day themed shirts, as it has become an ongoing joke ever since that first Reflections on Pi shirt that I wear a new pi-day shirt every year.
I’ve tinkered with shirt.woot. I’m gonna miss Joel. Though I have a merch account, so hopefully he can do some good there.
@kevlar51 Is that where he went? Here’s hoping for a mass cleaning out of design thieves.
@kevlar51 I checked out Merch. I’m not sure I get it. Is it about shirts? Or games? Or both? Watching the intro video only left me with more questions.
@ACraigL it’s basically a shirt direct to garment sales/print shop. like redbubble, but it’s amazon.
It’s geared towards app owners as “sell shirts about your popular apps via our services” but I’m not sure how much app developers make up their target demographics. But they have a bunch of tools that are useless to me because I’m not a game developer.
@kevlar51 Thanks. That helps. I’m still weird on that venn diagram but ok.
Squarries, Sputnik, Irony is the Opposite of Wrinkly. I still have these. So many great designs! I enjoyed working on and entering the contests for a while (tour for an imaginary band- Vlad and the Dudes 1922 Bolshevic Tour) After a while the same people won so I stopped. It always amazed me to see the range of outputs that stemmed from one concept! Thank you Joel!
My first shirt.woot purchases were two randoms, but the first I actually selected was:
@DaveInSoCal From derby #213. I bought all three winners plus Boots’ Mine when that printed at TT.
@narfcake
Does shirt.woot have an Official Shirt.Woot Cultural Historian as a payroll position? If so, I suss, not in your league, now that Joel is gone.
If not, you’re doing a better job that they could afford salary for.
@f00l I doubt it.
One of these days, I might post a thread full of all the inconsequential shirt.woot trivia I’ve amassed over the years – stuff like the first $12 shirt to sellout, which is Shhhhhhh, the fastest to sell out 3k, which is The Cheese is a Liederkranz or the last C-contract shirt offered, which is Gym Rat.
I made the terrible mistake of buying shirts when I was thinner. Now they just mock me as I clutch my chest each time I have to go upstairs (only a slight exaggeration).