Something to woot about
In an age of breakdown, a small but cheerful -- not to mention colorful -- bit of news reaches us from Texas, where woot.com's t-shirt site recently sold its 1,000,000th printed piece of geek culture. Since site launch, shirt.woot.com has sold a garment every 48.24 seconds since July 22, 2007.
The millionth shirt, according to the company, was sold for $10 on January 30th at 8:25am CST to a man in Houston. Fittingly, the shirt was a Derby winner -- a short designed by an artist competing to have a shirt chosen (by the users) for printing. "Sun Wukong (The Monkey King)" was the first-place shirt in that week's Derby, the theme of which was "Myths and Legends." Many of Woot's shirts are designed for them for free; tomorrow (Thursday), the site will branch into celebrity-designed T's with an offering from geek icon Wil Wheaton.
Woot's unusual business model -- sell one item a day, and when Woot's out of that item buyers are out of luck -- takes some explaining to novices. But the Carrollton-based firm (which was named the fastest-growing company in the area in last year's Comerica Bank Collin 60) seems to have made the concept of collectible clear enough to move a lot of cotton.
Woot also has a wine-sales branch in addition to its main electronics-and-random-closeouts business.