With all of the websites on the web
currently trying to capture a piece of the light-up garment market its hard to
know which ones to trust. Through experience and a great deal of research I
have come across what I believe to be the top player in this industry. As a
relatively new company in the market, D.A.F. Designs (www.dafdesigns.com) has
already captured a large audience and continues to grow, leaving behind a trail
of happy customers in the process. Through this article I will provide an
analysis of some of the major players currently in the market with the goal of
helping you find a quality company to buy from.
For those of you who do not already
know, the light-up shirt is a fairly new technology. As its name suggests it is
in fact a shirt that lights up. The light-up shirt uses electro-luminescent
panels attached typically by either Velcro or sewing to a t-shirt, long sleeve
shirt or tank top. The power-source of the light-up shirt is a battery pack
attached via a cable to the panel I had described earlier and this comes in a
variety of styles, ranging from 2XAAA to 4xAAA configurations. An even further
subdivision of the light-up shirt industry is the difference between the
standard light-up shirt and the sound activated light-up shirt. The sound
activated light-up shirt is a very interesting product because it reacts to any
sound that it comes in contact with. What I mean by this is when you play a
song on a device such as a stereo and adjust the sensitivity accordingly the
shirt panel will light-up with the music in a fashion dictated by the design on
the panel (these come typically as equalizers, but other styles are available).
Selling these shirts arise three main competitors: TheLightUpShirt, T-Qualizer,
and D.A.F. Designs. Breakdown:
TheLightUpShirt (Price:
Highest-Service: Very Poor - Delivery: Terrible - Product: Poor)
At first glance this company looks
very reputable mostly because they have a nice clean website to them. The first
thing I notice when I visit this site is their claim to having sponsored
various celebrities (Mike Posner, Jerry Springer etc), but after further
investigation and contacting both the legal contacts for these celebrities I
had found that there is in fact no connection between them and TheLightUpShirt
(and I expect them to take some form of action against this site).
Let me talk about my buying
experience:
If you try and email them you get no
response for a very long period of time and they didn t even respond to me for
2 weeks after my initial complaint. The actual product itself:
The packaging this shirt came in
gave me a good indication of how the quality of the shirt would be. When I
finally opened the box and felt the shirt I could tell they went to a great
extent to lower their production costs, and I am estimating the shirt being
about 140g of cotton weight (typical shirt is 180g). The worst part about the
shirt was the massive amount of shrinkage that occurred in the wash.
On the plus side the panel did work
correctly, but the battery pack was the 2xAAA version and I learned later that
this makes the shirt light-up more dimly than the 4xAAA model.
T-Qualizer (Price: 2nd Highest-
Service: Good - Delivery: Moderate - Product: Arrived broken)
Again this is another case of a nice
website that lacks on other fronts. My review of T-Qualizer parallels on
TheLightUpShirt, but the difference between these two companies is that
T-Qualizer sent me a broken product. I will update my review of this company
once I receive the replacement shirt.
D.A.F. Designs (Price: Lowest -
Service: Fantastic - Delivery: Speedy - Product: Best of the three
All in all, D.A.F. Designs
(www.dafdesigns.com) came out on top. They were the one company that didn t
just focus on a clean website, but took into account the whole consumer
experience. They really brought about a balanced scorecard approach to doing
business and I wish that more businesses operated in this manner.
My buying experience:
As I stated above, the service at
D.A.F. Designs is fantastic and they have the greatest selection of product
styles of these three competitors. I had assistance every step of the way and
the only downside to the buying experience is that some of their product photos
aren t the greatest, but because they are a relatively new company they are
constantly updating their website, so I expect these photos to be updated
sometime in the near future. The check-out process is very smooth and they
offer prices in both U.S.
and Canadian dollars, which makes it handy if you are worried about the
exchange rate.
The product itself:
When the package arrived it came in
a very sturdy box and included things you would typically see such as a packing
slip etc. D.A.F. Designs uses the 4xAAA style of battery pack, which is how I
noticed the massive difference in color vividness between
2xAAA(TheLightUpShirt) and 4xAAA(D.A.F. Designs) panels. The dafdesigns.com
shirt is 180g and is also pre-shrunk cotton (which I tested), so it won t be
shrinking on you in the wash.
Conclusion:
If you are looking for a light-up
shirt as a gift or for yourself, I definitely recommend D.A.F. Designs
(www.dafdesigns.com)
