Appearances do matter. People tend to associate what you wear with your personality and at times, they may even associate you with clubs, groups and certain beliefs. Depending on the circumstance and the location, their perception may be beneficial or even harmful.
But the fear of perception should never stop you from fully expressing who you truly are. And in the spirit of self-expression, you may need to take matters into your own hands and wear personalised T-shirts that reflect your own identity.
Here’s a collection of websites and startups which allows you to customise your own apparel. Plus, these make terrific personalised gifts.
1. Doobie
Doobie is an app that helps you design T-shirts on the fly. If you have an eye for design or even if you don’t, this app is possibly for you. If you often have moments where you find memes or pictures that would make great T-shirts, you can directly upload them onto the app and even add your own quotes to the artwork.
You can start of by either exploring the community or by designing your own T-shirt. If you choose the latter, you can either design a women’s roundneck T-shirt or a crop T-shirt, for men there’s the unisex roundneck, and there’s a roundneck design for kids. You will be provided with info once you make your choice and then you’re free to go wild.
You can select cool patterns from the app’s collection or you can upload your own artwork (basically anything that you’d think is cool) onto the app along with image-appropriate text.
Currently at the moment of writing, the app charges an extra USD3 to design the back—a feature that I think is cutting down on the ‘doobie cool’ but then again I’ve made peace with it.
Doobie claims to use the best ink to print their T-shirts and they do ship worldwide.
2. IDOtshirt.com
A rather cool site that gets the job done without the need for an app is IDOtshirt.com. The site does provide a great amount of simplicity but at the cost of customisability. Basically, you can choose the size and type of the T-shirt (women or men’s design), then edit the text on the back of the T-shirt, the number (like a number on a sports attire), colour/pattern of the font.
The T-shirts cost about RM130 and they you can get them shipped for free provided you’re in Malaysia (applies to a few states).
3. SaltyCustoms
Self-expression doesn’t just apply to individuals but it also applies to startups, clubs, and other groups. As a startup or a club, it’s sometimes cool to have your your teammates clothed in colours that best represent the theme of the club. What better way than to have a customised T-shirt?
SaltyCustoms is one of the leading apparel consultants that promises to come up with the best solution in terms of your corporate apparel needs. They even help with the design and they make sure that your ideas come to life.
They’ve worked with companies like Universal Music Group, ClubMed, Chattime and even Astro. I’d say that’s pretty legit.
4. Tmaker
If you’re looking for a personalised T-shirt but you’re not willing to spend a lot of cash, Tmaker is the platform for you. A simple unisex round neck T-shirt (plain) retails for about RM10 and they offer discounts based on the number of T-shirts that you order.
They have a simple platform that you can play around with. You get to change the color of the T-shirt (limited colours) and you can even add in text and images, if you prefer.
The price of the T-shirt increases as you place custom elements on the canvas. That being said, it does let you know what exactly you’re paying for as you go alone so you can add or remove the number of customisations you want, based on your budget.
5. Celebratee
If you’d like a more manual approach to designing your T-shirt—and by that I mean that you don’t like messing around with the canvases presented in your web browser—then you can contact the good people at Celebratee (their Facebook page didn’t seem very updated so we tried to give them a call but there was no answer).
You can select the type of apparel from their collection, and then email them the design that you’d like. You can let them know what exactly to print on the T-shirts; you can mention any particular quotes or images.
Their designer will prepare the draft within 24 hours based on your template and once you’ve made the payment, they will ship it to your doorstep.