Fraiday.com is Officially Released, Design Competition is Started

Other than Gravira.com and GantiBaju.com, we now have Fraiday.com who tries to enter shirts and design segment. Fraiday.com gives place for designers to send their design and get a chance to be printed on shirt products.

Alrizky, founderof Fraiday explained through email, “Fraiday is a website based clothing brand usingcrowd-sourcing (from crowd, by crowd, for crowd) system, and we are hoping to be able to make it through Asia market.”

Fraiday.com provides design competition facility for designers. Designs are sent to Fraiday website, and it will be published for certain amount of time and users (Fraiday’s community) are welcomed to vote for them. The winning design will be printed on shirts. Winners will get prizes of cash, other packages and shirts royalty.

From their explanation, procedures and facility on their website, Fraiday.com is similar with GantiBaju.com and Threadless.com. Design competition is also conducted based on votes from community, and other than that there will be design chosen by Fraiday team which will be produced. All shirts which will be produced based on the chosen design will also be available on their website.

Other than design, one of a few things that differs this website from GantiBaju.com is the prize amount. Fraiday provides cash prize of Rp 1,5 million while GantiBaju gives Rp 1 million. For shirt royalty, both website gives 10% royalty from each shirt sold.

The other difference is feature. Fraiday provide Progress feature which accept designer’s unfinished designs (rough artwork). Designers can submit their sketches, doodle, or an almost finished design to Fraiday, along the way they can get input, suggestions or feedback from community to finish or complete their work.

Their website announced that Fraiday welcomes designers to join their community and send their design. The clothing store will be opened in March 15, 2011.

Community and design work is the most important aspect for service providers such as Fraiday.com. One of GantiBaju’s success factors is community management and their success in getting designers with excellent work to be submitted.

After browsing around a bit, I think the designs in Fraiday.com are quite nice, although there are no (or not yet) specific theme or category because it’s still new, so there’s no connections in the designs. For competition level, there are other similar services in other countries, so it will be quite competitive. Each service can build their own service character, both from designs or community extra points to reach their market.

Monetizing strategy should come to their attention either. There is possibility that selling shirts online in design service competition such as Fraiday, might not be able to provide significant income. Various monetizing strategy should be considered. GantiBaju does it by becoming media outlet. It will be interesting to see what Fraiday will come up with.

My guess, it’ll take several months or even more just to see whether design competition way will work, from designers, getting winners, voters number and produced shirts online selling side. Fraiday is also still in beta version and just emerged. There still many thing to be developed, especially inputs from community. Let’s see what they will show us next.

Translated by Nita Sellya