Andy Meyer sat in the Truman State University library with his classmates, trying to cram months of biology lessons into the wee hours of the cold December night. But instead of memorizing the parts of the eye, he was watching the same American Eagle T-shirt go by.

“I was so fed up with everyone wearing the same shirt,” Meyer said. “I wanted to empower what I want to see the college community wearing.”

Andy Meyer, a Truman State junior, founded Rethink Clothing in mid-January. On his website, he sells T-shirts with designs from college artists, who get 35 percent of the profit.

“I try to have a new shirt every month,” Meyer, a political science and biology major, said. “I want a limited market with varying color choices for variety, so that it fits everyone’s style.”

Meyer said he picks designs based on “love at first sight.” “I see a shirt and I say, ‘I want to wear that.'”

While Meyer said he might stick with the T-shirt industry for “a while,” other entrepreneurs are in the business for the long run.

Design Kompany, a website that makes T-shirts for companies, started when husband-and-wife team Akira Morita and Dipika Kohli started the business in 1995 after they met making posters at North Carolina State University.

“Our first T-shirt sold out really fast,” Kohli said. “It was liberating because it was something we made and it was cotton and earthy.”

College of Fine Arts senior Alexander Hage said he introduced Design Kompany to stencil T-shirts when he interned for them in 2006.

Hage said he did the same work at Design Kompany as he did in Minneapolis, his hometown.

“I started stencil T-shirts in high school when I just wanted to make cheap T-shirts for my terrible band,” he said.

Hage said he and a friend started selling their own T-shirts to small Seattle retailers when they were working for Design Kompany.

Threadless.com started a T-shirt competition on an online forum and hosts an annual design competition with a $2,000 prize for the winner. Jake Nickell won the original competition and started the company in November 2000 as a way to keep the competitive spirit going.

“We developed through tenacity and we just kept doing what was working, and Threadless kept growing and growing,” said Threadless spokesman Bob Nanna.

Nanna said the online T-shirt site branched out from cyberspace in September, when the company opened a store in Chicago. The company sees the new store as a community center with a gallery and workshops, he said.

“The store gets a lot of foot traffic,” he said. “It is more of a tool to get people to the website.”