Our Story

Tweetee's story began in the summer of 2009. The seed of the idea came from a young entrepreneur named Tim Wong, who was about to be interviewed by an organization named DartBoston, which is "a community of ambitious young entrepreneurs and professionals in Boston helping one another make awesome things happen." Interestingly, he was being brought on their show not for Tweetee, but rather for another business idea altogether.

Prior to the show, Tim had done his homework. He knew that the DartBoston audience was very active on Twitter. So, it was with great gusto that Tim had reached out to his longtime friend, Javier Alfonzo. In addition to being an experienced graphic designer, Javier was also very active on Twitter. But, the icing on the cake was the fact that Javier had already launched a t-shirt company, selling Javier's unique and creative designs via an online website. Tim knew that he had found the right person to design the Twitter t-shirt which he would wear on the DartBoston show.

The Twitter t-shirt was an instant hit with the crowd. People immediately recognized that the text on the t-shirt was Tim's @username on Twitter, even without the words "Twitter" or "tweet" or "follow me" written anywhere on the t-shirt. The simplicity of the t-shirt was what got people buzzing.

But, despite all of this attention, the possibility of turning this simple idea into a business venture had never crossed Tim's mind. It would take another two years for the fire to re-kindle again, when a friend of Tim's had requested a t-shirt of her own, with her Twitter @username on the front. It was then, in the spring of 2011, that Tim posed a magical question to Javier: "Can we make 1,000 of these in a day?"

At first, the answer was "no", for a multitude of reasons. But, after bouncing ideas back and forth, Tim and Javier were able to figure everything out. They analyzed the competition. They surveyed their potential vendors. They came up with pricing strategies, marketing plans, business partnerships, and the whole nine yards.

By the end of the night, they walked away with a plan for making this seed go viral.