So what's in store for Cafepress in 2007? Read on for a sneak peek of what's in the works. Maternity clothes, dark apparel for kids, new product photos, new tools and talk of a Cafepress Community Council are just a few topics that were touched on in the Cafepress Executive Chat on Thursday Jan. 25th.
There's a lot of info touched on here and a big thanks to Kristen from Great Gear for putting this together for those of us who couldn't make it to the chat!
Please keep in mind the following was compiled by a third party...not from Cafepress or it's employees, so nothing is "set in stone" and should not be mistaken as official announcements from Cafepress. Enjoy!
Here's who participated in the chat, along with over 100 shopkeepers...
Fred DurhamCo-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Maheesh JainCo-Founder and Vice President of Business Development
Jill KulickVice President of Human Resources
Mehdi MaghsoodniaVice President of Products and Site Operations
AngelaOur Cafepress Community Advocate
Britta(Sorry, Britta...I don't know your title!)
Thu Jan 25, 2007
Chat Notes - Executive Chat
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CP Plans for 2007
Brief agenda for the chat:
- Fred will start with an intro and pass the baton to Jill and Mehdi.
Then we'll go into the Q&A portion that you all love so much.
Fred
- Happy 2007 Everyone!
- Thanks to SKs (Shopkeepers) for being a part of CP (Cafepress) and helping make 2006 a big success. Did a great job promoting and marketing your shops in 2006, esp. the holidays - sales far above projections.
- Recap 2006: Production expansion to Kentucky is complete (now have 5x the capacity we had before we moved). Improved Shipping system and average order sizes have increased. Launched beta 2.0 for black shirts and are fine tuning the process. Hosted inaugural CPConnect in October. Launched dynamic color swatches for new shirt colors, new colors too. Sig. increase in shirt sales in Nov-Dec.
- Just got back from 3 weeks in India and just catching up. :-)
Jill
- Calling 2007, informally, 'the year of new merchandise' around the office.
- At CPConnect, SKs added to 'the list' on the wall. Guess what? Most
were requests for new merchandise. Planning to launch a lot of it this
year and the rest is still being researched.
- In addition, this year one of our major focuses will be on community
involvement. "The List" is a perfect example of how great suggestions
can be a reality in the CP system.
- Based on these great results we are in the process of developing a
Community Council program - to be rolled out this year. Details are
being ironed out, but the council will be to help us develop and review
major programs, features, services that impact the community.
Mehdi
- We continue to invest in our site infrastructure, which will increase
its performance, but also allow us to handle our rapid growth. We are
working on our shop infrastructure to handle the demand and also
maintain high performance in the face of load. Working on image
services to handle the growth and maintain high level of performance.
Various
- Transparencies will be available only for apparel products with the
next release. No plans to offer trans. on other products.
- Printing on the back of dark garments is a favorite request. Looking
into requirements for this - stay tuned.
- Political categories - working on updating them for the 2008
presidential election - looking at later next week.
- Have plus size apparel on our launch schedule for new merchandise. Hoping to have plus-size apparel before Fall. Taking some time because most of the off the shelf blank plus size garments aren't very nice and we are designing our own products.
- Book Questions: Plan on serving SKs who are currently selling books to gain feedback on paper preference this year (Q about cream colored paper).
- Looking at San Francisco again for the 2007 conference.
- Looking into premium shop templates and will be using the Community Council to help us determine how to best satisfy the needs of our community.
- New merchandise announced recently will be available in early February.
- Will Click shirt become part of the SK's toolbox in 2007? May not be
offered on the main Cafepress site but it could possibly be made
available as a third party plug in. (click-shirt.com - third party
program using CP API.)
- Have product additions planned throughout most of 2007 - spaced out
during the year. Of course we will give you a break over Holidays
because you will be so busy with orders.
- New products in 2007? (previously posted - first wave of new shirts)
Apparel in more colors and more styles. Can't spill all secrets yet.
- Currently evaluating various ways to improve the buyer and seller
experience outside the US - includes how the site works, currency
management, customer support, etc. In planning mode - no time line yet.
- Still working out how Community Council will be chosen.
- Dark shirts will be a part of the kid's collection for this year!
- Bulk tiers and shipping options are being evaluated - will be asking
the Community Council to help us with this.
- Transparencies for all apparel in February.
- cafepressdn.com and contact team for API for bulk adding of products.
- Getting non-apparel stuff too.
- Working on improving edge detection (white outline) on dark technology.
- API (application programming interface) considered successful so far. Working on growing our developer community to build more unique tools around it.
- Probably not getting into domain hosting right now. Use godaddy.com
and other places for that and redirect to shop.
- Finalizing maternity clothes right now while we chat! Very specialized product that requires custom specs. This year sometime.
- CP does advertise online mostly. Increasing marketing spend by 50% in 2007 to drive more traffic to MP.
- Subdomains like shopid.cafepress.com instead of cafepress.com/shopid? Introduces security risk and complexity to DNS. Some people do it but at this sort of scale and traffic, it's an idea that scares us, and since reliability is important, we hate to do things that scare even us.
- Looking how to add a designer like at click-shirt.com to the overall flow of the site.
- White will still be clear on light shirts when using transparent images.
- Modding intentionally inappropriate image tagging? Want feedback and ideas about this! Most everyone said yes - help get rid of tagging spam, etc. Some won't use topicads because of bad tagging. People say it has become real problem. AVDC2007 is a good example. Tricky area overall.
- Pet products this year? Looking into it - stay tuned! Rapid growth category!
- Love to see more stuff like the Snakes on a Plane thing? Working on it! Maheesh's crystal ball says some fun stuff will happen in 2007.
- When is XML feed version coming out and how to best provide feedback for next version. Mehdi says 30-60 days?? dn@cafepress.com
- Fred leaves 15 minutes early - says bye and happy new year.
- Larger print area? Working on this solution right now to offer larger print area on apparel - no definite timeline at this time - stay tuned of course.
- Be able to export sales and order data into a format such as CSV or XLS for accounting purposes? Will put it on the list - send more suggestions like this to dn@cafepress.com
- Products featured in CP emails and on the CP homepage are selected by the Online Marketing Team, from the Marketplace, that are appropriate for the public, fit the theme and displays well (tiny images don't).
- Want to work with Community Council on issue that sections are getting really LONG because of the long list of available products - want to find good solution for this.
- Have a whole year of great chat workshops and are looking into switching chat software that supports visuals.
- Close to taking dark shirts out of beta. Continue to perfect it. Lesson we have learned is not to release beta on new products going forward. Our community and customers made it clear that quality is important. How do SKs feel about beta - let us know. (Most answered with 'quality' replies. Maybe beta to SKs only - not to public. Maybe lower priced for beta.)
- CP-produced garments is a way for us to control the quality, color, and size.
- Going to be taking new photos of the products - will be able to see this in the next release.
- Had over 100 Shopkeepers in chat - many questions missed - cpchat@cafepress.com
- People made suggestions for various charity shops.
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So that about sums it up!
