Entrepreneur’s Online Shirt Design Business Fits Indonesia to a Tee

For those not aware of it yet, GantiBaju is a website where designers can send their designs to compete in an online competition. The winning designers get money prizes, vouchers, and 10 percent royalty for each shirt design sold at GantiBaju. The website is known for pioneering this strategy in Indonesia, and since its launch in February 2010, there have been other websites who tried to follow its lead, such as Fraiday.com. Aria said that currently GantiBaju has over 30,000 members, most of them designers. Back in April, he shared a bit about the company’s shirt stats:

[Our members] have submitted over 12,000 designs in total for this past two years. Currently we are selling about 1,200 to 1,800 tees each month in our online, offline, and also our affiliate network across Indonesia.

Exploring New Business

After the success of GantiBaju, Aria then also became one of the co-founders of new clothing startup Tees.co.id that was launched just last week.

Unlike GantiBaju, Tees.co.id is a clothing marketplace where users do not have to compete in any competitions to get their designs approved. Users need only to focus on their designs to open an online store there, while the production and administration cost would be handled by Tees for the price of IDR 85,000 ($9) per shirt. Users can then determine their own product price and profit.

Tees has about 30 stores with over a hundred products on launch day, and Aria said that the traditional t-shirt printing services and other offline digital printing services are considered to be the startup’s competitors. GantiBaju and Tees both have one unnamed investor, not related to one another. Aria talks more about Tees to us via email:

Can you tell us a bit about your team at Tees?

Tees has three active stakeholders: Gary Lilardi, Aria Rajasa and Bima Satria Tama. We also have about eight people working on development, production, design and customer relations.

Are Tees and GantiBaju connected one to another? What was the story behind Tees?

Tees.co.id is a separate entity from gantibaju.com with different stakeholders.

The idea behind tees.co.id comes from the discussion me and Gary had about a year ago. We think that it’s quite troublesome to produce a t-shirt because of the long process (about two to four weeks) and the minimum orders that we have to make to make the price reasonable. So Gary came up with a solution of creating an on-demand service where we can create a tees in an instant with no minimum number of production.