Random Musings

The internet is absolutely chock full of great shirts and shirt sites... it's entirely possible that one may never end up owning everything they like. Yet, with so many options to choose from, I feel it odd that the one thing I'm always willing to save cash for is a random grab bag. Uneetee has long offered mystery shirts on random Mondays, and there are rumblings at TeeFury that similar may happen there, which is exciting to me. The industry leader, however, is definitely shirt.woot, which sees a random bag appear about once every two months. It's a sensible move from woot, since their main site has long been known to offer "bags of crap," precious gems that are the ultimate consumer lottery, containing anything from flat screen TVs to the more common and apt broken junk. In the case of the shirts, the worst case scenario is a sleep shirt, a work-out shirt, or a shirt for painting. Maybe you could even make gifts out of them.

Woot's latest random sale was Thursday, and the early bags are featuring any number of shirts from throughout their summer months (we're talking around mid-May to mid-September). The shirts are long since sold out, but come tomorrow, and the rest of the week that follows, people will start getting their bags in. Some will be ecstatic as they unearth the shirt they've always wanted but missed, or shirts they never thought they'd like, but fall in love with upon opening their bags. But others will be left very unsatisfied. This post is for you.

You see, some of you may not know yet, but there's a great site named TeeTrade which was created especially for these sales. You can use your shirts as currency for newer or better shirts, such as Road Closed, PB & Jellyfish, or Swordfish Fencing (shown above). TeeTrade makes it easy to make contact with other shirt owners and arrange trades privately. As you might expect, all trades are at your own risk, but there is a trade feedback area for each user to help you trade with confidence. And since it's all contained to one site, you end up getting a lot more response for a lot less effort.

Of course, if there's more to it for you than just improving your lot, you can always use the search function to find specific shirts you may have wanted and missed. A couple such shirts I scored last time were Iceberg A Head, Decibliterated, and Monkey Play. Furthermore, you can post shirts as "Wanted," which means a user with your desired shirt could find you instead. It's like a dating site for shirt wearers, except in this case, you WANT to find people totally unlike you.

But let's say you have a shirt that doesn't fit anymore, and you don't want another shirt. You could always trade it for money, as represented above by It's Going Out Faster Than It's Coming In (which I did trade through the site as well). In the same fashion, let's say you got up too late and your size sold out, or you've otherwise found a shirt you need, but have nothing to trade... there is nothing holding you back from offering green for a shirt you want. I snagged It Might Have Been a Giant, which was nine months reckoned by the time I got my copy. It drives home an important reason to check the site out: the shirts available are only limited to what shirts the users want to let go of.

I seriously believe this is a site that any shirt fan should check out, no matter where they shop, and above is possibly the best evidence: The Clockwork Menagerie. This is a shirt from Threadless's "12 Club," which offers one exclusive but totally random shirt a month. Regular Threadless users couldn't buy this shirt unless they had already become members of the 12 Club before it printed. Yet I got one from TeeTrade. Brag brag brag. Seriously, though, I highly recommend the site to ANY shirt fan, no matter what site they favor. Even if you don't woot, you could find a shirt that makes you wish you had that one day. Even if you won't risk a random bag, you might have a shirt you've grown away from and want to sell off or trade. There are shirts from all manner of sites up for trade, although woot is certainly the biggest draw, and many people have even submit non website shirts to try their luck. It's an incredible resource for all shirt fans, and if you've been looking to change up your wardrobe, it could be just what you needed.