Carrollton Leader > News
Loot from Woot
Sarah Blaskovich/Staff photo. Alicia Santillan, shipping coordinator for shirt.woot.com, lays several hundred T-shirts each day at their Carrollton headquarters. The company sells one T-shirt design per day at a limited quantity.
SARAH BLASKOVICH, Staff Writer
Chances are, this T-shirt will be sold out by time you read this.
But if you want to snag tomorrow’s, there’s still time. Be sure you’re awake at midnight.
Web surfers around the globe mostly those who fall in the “extremely nerdy” category, says one employee are buying up one-time-only T-shirts online from the little shop at 4121 International Parkway.
Shirt.woot.com isn’t a Web world away after all. It’s down the street in Carrollton, nestled next to a host of other Internet-based companies that don’t elicit local attention.
“We just have never reached out locally,” said Matt Rutledge, CEO of woot.com.
They didn’t have to. Their most loyal customers didn’t live nearby anyway.
Shirt.woot.com, like its creator, woot.com, sells a limited amount of a single item each day at midnight. Once the item is sold out which happened to shirt.woot.com in 18 minutes Thursday the 1,000 or so buyers have a coveted tee that they can say is quite unique.
Launched in July, shirt.woot.com as the name suggests only sells T-shirts. Their warehouse walls are lined with the first 50 or so colorful shirts, ranging from the infamous “screaming monkey” tee, which depicts just that, to the “nobody’s perfect” tee, in which the wearer dons three-and-a-half stars on his or her chest as a stab at humbly rating self-worth.
Most of their clientele are “hard core Internet users,” said Thomas Williams, production manager for the silk screened T-shirts.
Each day, they post the name of the “first sucker” and the “wooter to blame for sellout” on the Web site. The site also shows when former customers returned to the site. On Tuesday, for instance, 8 percent of customers that bought the “batshirt crazy” tee have purchased more than 25 items from woot.com.
“People feel like they’re winning,” Williams said, his hands spackled with T-shirt ink. “There’s huge value for the person who finds it.”
The concept
The company idea evolved from Rutledge’s former company, Synapse Micro, which was a wholesale distributor based out of Carrollton. Rutledge often found his company had excess items and had nothing to do with them.
“To us, it was like, Well, we need to get rid of this crap. What do we do?’” Rutledge said.
Then evolved the woot.
The word “woot” is used by tech-savvy people as an interjection into a conversation, spelled “w00t!” It’s used to show excitement or sarcasm.
Woot has now transformed into a name for Web-based loot, sold one item at a time by Rutledge’s company.
“The attitude is seen as genius, or novel. To us, it was like, Well, we’ve got to get rid of this.’ There weren’t many leaps of intuition,” Rutledge said.
On most days, about 500,000 different browsers shop on woot.com.
The new product
Last week, woot.com unveiled its newest spawn: sellout.woot.com. The strategy is the same as woot.com and shirt.woot.com one item a day, at a limited quantity but it has partnered with Yahoo.
Now, “less hardcore Internet users,” as Williams names them, can also shop on woot.com. Because woot.com is almost exclusively used by people who use the Internet often, their spot on the Yahoo Shopping site reaches out to browsers who may only check their e-mail everyday.
Cleverly disguised as Yahoo’s “deal of the day,” those items are actually Woot products, said Derek Chapin, chief financial officer for woot.com.
The atmosphere
“No one wears a tie at woot. No one has ever worn a tie at woot,” Williams said.
He and all the employees in the silk screened T-shirt room wear jeans, although Williams can generally be found in an old shirt.woot.com T-shirt and paint-splattered overalls.
The shirts are made on-site in the warehouse beside more than 130,000 boxes of American Apparel plain tees.
The average American Apparel t-shirt costs $15, Chapin said, but the company sells their shirts printed with a design for each day for $10, including shipping.
On Mondays through Thursdays, the T-shirt designs are created by artists in a woot.com office in St. Louis. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the designs are chosen through the company’s online “derby.” During the derby, a theme is picked each weekend and artists around the world are free to design their T-shirt. The top three submitted graphics are made into shirts.
“We will look at every submission, but unfortunately, we might not be able to respond to everyone,” writes Jason Toon on shirt.woot.com’s Frequently Asked Questions page. “Your chances are much, much better if you don’t act like a total jerk.”
Although the company claims shirts aren’t available after they sell their allotted amount, it’s not really true.
For “very adept Internet users,” some shirts that received high interest are still available in secret. For instance, the company’s eighth T-shirt is still being sold under the guise of the Web site’s confusing lingo.
The old shirts aren’t hard to find if you look in the right place, Williams said.
He’s right.
But it’s best not to spoil the surprise.
Contact Sarah Blaskovich at 972-628-4074 or SBlaskovich@acnpapers.com.
Chances are, this T-shirt will be sold out by time you read this.
But if you want to snag tomorrow’s, there’s still time. Be sure you’re awake at midnight.
Web surfers around the globe mostly those who fall in the “extremely nerdy” category, says one employee are buying up one-time-only T-shirts online from the little shop at 4121 International Parkway.
Shirt.woot.com isn’t a Web world away after all. It’s down the street in Carrollton, nestled next to a host of other Internet-based companies that don’t elicit local attention.
“We just have never reached out locally,” said Matt Rutledge, CEO of woot.com.
They didn’t have to. Their most loyal customers didn’t live nearby anyway.
Shirt.woot.com, like its creator, woot.com, sells a limited amount of a single item each day at midnight. Once the item is sold out which happened to shirt.woot.com in 18 minutes Thursday the 1,000 or so buyers have a coveted tee that they can say is quite unique.
Launched in July, shirt.woot.com as the name suggests only sells T-shirts. Their warehouse walls are lined with the first 50 or so colorful shirts, ranging from the infamous “screaming monkey” tee, which depicts just that, to the “nobody’s perfect” tee, in which the wearer dons three-and-a-half stars on his or her chest as a stab at humbly rating self-worth.
Most of their clientele are “hard core Internet users,” said Thomas Williams, production manager for the silk screened T-shirts.
Each day, they post the name of the “first sucker” and the “wooter to blame for sellout” on the Web site. The site also shows when former customers returned to the site. On Tuesday, for instance, 8 percent of customers that bought the “batshirt crazy” tee have purchased more than 25 items from woot.com.
“People feel like they’re winning,” Williams said, his hands spackled with T-shirt ink. “There’s huge value for the person who finds it.”
The concept
The company idea evolved from Rutledge’s former company, Synapse Micro, which was a wholesale distributor based out of Carrollton. Rutledge often found his company had excess items and had nothing to do with them.
“To us, it was like, Well, we need to get rid of this crap. What do we do?’” Rutledge said.
Then evolved the woot.
The word “woot” is used by tech-savvy people as an interjection into a conversation, spelled “w00t!” It’s used to show excitement or sarcasm.
Woot has now transformed into a name for Web-based loot, sold one item at a time by Rutledge’s company.
“The attitude is seen as genius, or novel. To us, it was like, Well, we’ve got to get rid of this.’ There weren’t many leaps of intuition,” Rutledge said.
On most days, about 500,000 different browsers shop on woot.com.
The new product
Last week, woot.com unveiled its newest spawn: sellout.woot.com. The strategy is the same as woot.com and shirt.woot.com one item a day, at a limited quantity but it has partnered with Yahoo.
Now, “less hardcore Internet users,” as Williams names them, can also shop on woot.com. Because woot.com is almost exclusively used by people who use the Internet often, their spot on the Yahoo Shopping site reaches out to browsers who may only check their e-mail everyday.
Cleverly disguised as Yahoo’s “deal of the day,” those items are actually Woot products, said Derek Chapin, chief financial officer for woot.com.
The atmosphere
“No one wears a tie at woot. No one has ever worn a tie at woot,” Williams said.
He and all the employees in the silk screened T-shirt room wear jeans, although Williams can generally be found in an old shirt.woot.com T-shirt and paint-splattered overalls.
The shirts are made on-site in the warehouse beside more than 130,000 boxes of American Apparel plain tees.
The average American Apparel t-shirt costs $15, Chapin said, but the company sells their shirts printed with a design for each day for $10, including shipping.
On Mondays through Thursdays, the T-shirt designs are created by artists in a woot.com office in St. Louis. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the designs are chosen through the company’s online “derby.” During the derby, a theme is picked each weekend and artists around the world are free to design their T-shirt. The top three submitted graphics are made into shirts.
“We will look at every submission, but unfortunately, we might not be able to respond to everyone,” writes Jason Toon on shirt.woot.com’s Frequently Asked Questions page. “Your chances are much, much better if you don’t act like a total jerk.”
Although the company claims shirts aren’t available after they sell their allotted amount, it’s not really true.
For “very adept Internet users,” some shirts that received high interest are still available in secret. For instance, the company’s eighth T-shirt is still being sold under the guise of the Web site’s confusing lingo.
The old shirts aren’t hard to find if you look in the right place, Williams said.
He’s right.
But it’s best not to spoil the surprise.
Contact Sarah Blaskovich at 972-628-4074 or SBlaskovich@acnpapers.com.
Copyright © 2012 - Star Local News