Hong Kong’s Snaptee secures $750K to build a social network for T-shirt lovers

Snaptee, the Hong Kong startup that sells t-shirts sporting DIY graphics from amateur designers, has secured US$750,000 in funding from local incubator Nest, the newly launched SXE Ventures, and Groupon Asia alumni Danny Yeung and Joel Neoh. The company will use the funding to add more social network-esque features to its app.

If you’ve never heard of Snaptee, that’s okay – but slacker sartorialists might want to spend thirty seconds on the free download. The app lets artists upload graphics specifically for T-shirts, which other users can then purchase directly from Snaptee. While Snaptee’s premise resembles that of Threadless, the apparel vendor that that brought nerdy designs to thousands of pseudo-Marxist high schoolers, the company distinguishes itself from its competition by selling exclusively on its smartphone app. Snaptee’s designers also tend to favor a 10’s post-irony hip-hop aesthetic, rather than Threadless’ hipster-gone-geekster – but we at Tech in Asia are far from couture snobs, even when it comes to T-shirts.

When we last checked in with Snaptee in February 2014, the company claimed to feature over 700,000 unique T-shirt designs. Cofounder Wai Lun told Tech in Asia that the figure is now fast approaching 2 million. The company hasn’t yet revealed its total shipments or sales revenues, however.

Lun says that Snaptee will use the funding to ramp up its social features. At present, users can follow designers, “like” certain graphics, and post short bios, but there’s little else when it comes to community building and interaction.

See: SXE Ventures is a new VC with $10M to spend, puts $1M into 500 Durians

“We’ve been highly focused on content creation, meaning we help users create designs. Now we think it’s a good time to create a design network, where people can appreciate each other’s work and collaborate together. We want to create a highly creative design community for apparel,” says Lun. “For example, if you want to look at cat designs, you might be able to search for “cats” and see a lot of cat-related T-shirts from people around the world,” he adds.