| RavenBlog |
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| Comments on Wednesday 11 September 2002: |
| I was pondering some T-shirt-selling tomfoolery, related to a top secret project. I went to the first place people go when they want to print and sell T-shirts and are too lazy to do it themselves; cafepress.com. $13.99 they take off the top, for even a single-colour single-sided print on a white T-shirt. I can get 12 such shirts printed at $4 each, elsewhere. It's certainly not all shipping-and-handling charges, either, since they charge that on top. How can they charge so much? Probably by having no competition at all for the "print, sell, ship" service. How can they have no competition? I wonder if perhaps there's a monopolistic patent in place. I'm rather tempted to set up a similar service with a slightly different focus - instead of Cafepress's "no client risk" approach, I would rather offer a "small risk, but double your profit" approach. It appears that an outlay of under $1000 enables one to screen-print four-colour T-shirts for under $2 each (plus about $12 per design per colour for making the screens). A cafepress-competing business, then, could reasonably charge $50 per design plus $8 per shirt plus shipping-and-handling, making a decent profit, and still giving more money to the client so long as the client sells at least 10 shirts. I suppose I would also insist on the client paying for an initial run of at least 24 to be in stock, since printing them individually would be a pain. Even so, it would be a nice compromise between Cafepress's "we've got your money, la la la" approach, and the more standard "give us your money, we give you T-shirts" approach. Since I don't want to have the T-shirts I might design, and don't want to have to mess with shipping things, this compromising business model would be ideal for my purpose, and, I suspect, for many others'. Also, Cafepress's products are rubbish, and fade. I couldn't charge $15 (plus shipping) for such a thing. To summarise my points here - I would like to set up a business that would compete with Cafepress, but I fear they would probably slap me around with a secret patent, and also I would tire of running such a business in short order. It still seems like it might be worth it, though, if there's no patent issue; the drudgery could be offloaded on grunts, if such a business were to take off. And I'd quite enjoy doing the web-based part. Anyone nearby got $1000, a 10'x10' spare room, and some time to invest? [13:05] |
| Lenny |
| Not related to the t-shirts, but as for the paltry sales of your book. I plan to increase the number by 1.... if I can ever get a job and some money :/ |
| Kyrin |
| Hell, I got the Cambodia t-shirts printed red on black for 4 bucks including the shirts, for a 24 count. let me know if you do want to get shirts, I know a reputable screen printing business that can meet a deadline. |
| RavenBlack |
| No, that's not the point. I could do that. That's not what I want. I don't want shirts. I want money. I don't want to have piles of shirts sitting around the place until someone sees fit to order them, using paypal because I can't take credit cards. I don't want to ever even see a t-shirt. I want someone else to print the shirts, to take the money, to ship them to the customer, and then to give me some of the money. Like Cafepress do, but with reasonable pricing instead of fucking stupid. Since there is no such service, I want to create it. |
| mvo |
| I would like someone else to work for me doing something that I don't want to know about. I don't even want to waste my brain cells knowing which business they are in. But they should definitely send me money. Every month. Piles of it. |
| Tyrethali |
| That's one way of looking at it. The other is that he wants to help create a t-shirt-making service, and he will design and oversee the website, only only that, and be paid by commission from sales made by said website. Which is far more reasonable, but less amusingly stated. Send me money. |
| Tyrethali |
| AND only that, even. |
| mvo |
| Didn't mean the above as an insult, so I hope Raven did not take any offense. Off for the weekend now, have a happy one everyone. |
| TruthGirl |
| I would definately like something other than cafepress, I feel ripped off a lot and I am even a store owner. I make a lot of money out of my store but not nearly as much as I know I am "really" owed. |
| gifted one |
| Great feedback eveyone, i'am new to the t -shirt business and would like to know if you all could get me started in the right direction. |
| Linkin |
| In June 2009, CafePress began competing with the artists for whom it acts as printer and shipper. CafePress rents web shops to its artists. The artist creates a website page and manually loads the desired blank products. The artist imports his image onto each product, arranges the products on the page, describes the products, titles the products and tags the images. Initially, the artist would set a markup and received the markup for each product sold. However, recently CafePress began competing with its artists, using the artists' own images. CafePress created a marketplace where a customer can search a keyword. That search brings up artist products. When the customer buys from the marketplace CafePress pays the artist 10% of the price CafePress set. Both the customer and the artist lose money. If the artist's shop sells a t-shirt for $21, the artist makes $3.01. If the marketplace sells the same shirt for $25, the artist gets $2.50. The customer pays $4 more, and the artist gets $0.51 less. CafePress tells artists to "promote your own shop," but CafePress buys Google adwords using the very image tags the artist provided. CafePress justifies this bait and switch of service terms by telling artists they can opt out if they don't like the new terms; however, many have spent as much as 7 or 8 years creating as many as 88000 images. In spite of their sweat-equity, many shopkeepers (content providers) are building shops at other print-on-demand companies and then closing their CafePress shops due to the broken faith and trust, the financial hardship CafePress has delivered into so many lives, and the huge amount of time and dedicated effort all lost in the momentum of their own businesses. Would you keep your AMOCO station franchise if AMOCO built a company store across the street from you? |