Whether its congratulating your sales team for closing new leads, giving away prizes on a social media contest, or simply trying to say thank you to your loyal customers; a T-shirt with a custom quote–be it touchy, funny or just plain absurd–goes a long way in leaving a lasting impression.
StartupThreads makes it easy to print and ship custom apparel (why stop at t-shirts!) for organization that use them in their marketing activities.
Frank Denbow founded and bootstrapped StartupThreads all by himself. Having been active in the New York startup and hackathon scene for a number of years, Frank has multiple awards to his name and even curated events like Startup Digest.
Started as a simple t-shirt printing service, he was approached by a few companies like Stripe and Mixpanel who wanted help with the logistics involved in shipping out the custom merchandise. Says Frank, “The alternative is to go to the post office and mail out hundreds of shirts which is a pain. So we eventually created the platform we have now.”
The problem is that marketing with merchandise doesn’t scale well for companies and they don’t have tools to use this channel effectively. Competition from online printing sites like CustomInk doesn’t bother Frank because his company is providing other great features on top of printing like option for saving inventory instead of doing a one-time bulk order and automated t-shirt shipping via APIs. “We plan on expanding the capabilities of our API and adding integration with other relevant services”, adds Frank.
StartupThreads is being targeted at medium and large companies that target developers or have a strong sales process. The company takes a small fee on sales.
