Shirt City Club T-Shirt Design Contest: Win $500

ShirtCity.com is looking for great T-shirt designs. All you have to do is sign up, submit a design, and let the community vote on it (Threadless style). The deadline is June 1st, 2007 for submissions.

The grand prize winner receives a one-time royalty payment of $500, but all submitted designs have a chance to be selected and printed/sold through a licensing agreement. Designers who's designs are selected this way will earn royalty on any sales of that design.

Might be worth a shot.

Drop shipping, PayPal and Belt Buckles, Oh my! ArtsCafe.com

So you've been wanting to sell your illustration through Ebay printed on a single money clip or key chain that you didn't have to print, warehouse or ship? Well now, it seems, you can with a company I just learned about called ArtsCafe.com.

So far it's the only print on demand website I've seen that offers such a unique array of products to print your art, design or photography on.

It appears they specialize in print on demand and drop-shipping and have a huge selection of products ranging from letter openers to onesies. And with PayPal accepted, this opens up new doors to designers to sell via EBay.

Their site looks nice, but leaves me wondering who they are, and where they came from. Who's behind the site? I'm not sure. The About Us page is nothing more than marketing speak and doesn't give names of anyone who's running the company.
On their contact page, I see they are based in Hong Kong, with a mailing address in Texas. And Google searches won't turn up much of anything on the company.

English is clearly not their first language and is evident by the numerous grammar errors throughout the site. But I won't hold that against them...my grammars ain't perfect neither. And their marketplace must be in beta because I'm not finding products in there.

But criticisms aside, I'd still be inclined to try them out and see if they deliver. I mean, who else out there offers no minimum purchase quantities of things like Itallian charms and belt buckles with drop shipping and PayPal payment options? Seems almost too good to be true.

Plea for help! Will someone offer a print-on-demand throw pillow with no black border?

To continue on with my ModPillows story, I have to address the obvious...the big black borders!

So what about those black borders?

So far the only downside to my new pillow store, is, unfortunately, the pillows themselves! Don't get me wrong, they are great soft pillows, they're a good size, they feel nice, the printing is nice, and I have some at home right now. I just am not a fan of the big black border I'm stuck with designing within. I'm doing my best to come up with designs that will look good within the confines of bold black borders, and I see my store as a starting point. But eventually I need to be able to expand my designs beyond these borders.

From my experiences with pillows and Cafepress, I've come to these conclusions:

1. Cafepress is the only place I've found where I can print and sell my own pillows on-demand.

2. They currently offer ONE style of pillow with black borders.

3. I'm guessing they aren't a huge seller for Cafepress (due to CP's lack of interest in my request for new pillow styles), and I know T-shirts are their biggest selling product. It is what they specialize in.

4. They may not sell well because Cafepress doesn't appeal to textile designers, and CP's pillows are best suited for printing T-shirt phrases and photographs (which don't typically sell well on pillows).

From these conclusions all I can say is that there needs to be another way. Another pillow design. More shapes, more styles, no borders. There is a market for this stuff! So I'll throw this business idea out there to any young, ambitious entrepreneurs:

If someone out there would create a print-on-demand website and service that focused on textile design, curtains, throw pillows, pillow cases, reversable pillow coverings, and maybe even sheets, placemats and cloth or paper napkins, you'd have me signing up before you can say "beta!" And I bet you'd attract a different type of designer.

Does anyone know of another print on demand pillow available? Is anyone out there willing to add them to their current line?

Designing Backwards: Start with the market

I'm working on a little business experiment and thought I'd share.

It may not seem backwards to marketing people start with the market, but in the Cafepress community of designers, there seems to be a common school of thought regarding design:

1. Think up a clever design.
2. Put it on a T-shirt.
3. Promote it and sell it.

This is not a bad formula and works well with cartoon characters, clever text phrases, and funny comic strip art which all work well on T-shirts, mugs, aprons, or caps. I even use the above formula for my T-shirts and do quite well. And most Cafepress shopkeepers, for that matter, design something clever, put it on a shirt, and then either wait to see if it sells, or maybe pay for a little advertising.


Cafepress' throw pillow

But what about pillows?

Cafepress sells them, you know. I'm not sure how big of a seller they are, as most of what I see in the marketplace on their pillows are cartoons, T-shirt phrases (which work best on T-shirts), some fine art and photography (which usually work best on framed prints or posters). And speaking from personal experience with BusyBodies I rarely sell pillows. I feature them "just in case" but I know my stick figures don't lend themselves well to home décor as well as they do to T-shirts. I did not design BusyBodies with pillows in mind.

Now to think backwards...

I thought I'd open up a new Cafepress Premium shop from a different angle, appeal to a different market, and design with a new perspective:

1. Determine my market and figure out places and ways I will promote my products.
2. Consider one product family to feature.
3. Design specifically for this one product and market segment.
THEN promote (see step one)

It's a fresh way to approach designing for Cafepress and so far so good. The market I've been wanting to tap into for a while is that of modern home interior & product design (step #1), and people who appreciate a bargain.

But to narrow it to a product (step #2), I was specifically interested in decorative throw pillows. I LOVE throw pillows but am usually disappointed at the price tag. Sure, it's often worth it as many of these great pillows are made of things like hand printed silk or embroidered wool (and I admit to having some throw pillows custom-made to match our livingroom a few years back), but sometimes I just like the pattern on a pillow and want it on my couch for under $110. Heck, under $20 would sure be nice, especially since trends are always changing, and my pillow addiction has already costed me a bundle.

That was the "ah-ha" moment. Why not come up with my own modern pillow designs? Then sell them for under $20 through Cafepress, and market them to the IKEA shoppers of the world who appreciate good design but don't want to pay an arm and a leg for it.

And ModPillows was born.




OK there really are more than three steps to all of this. Somewhere after "step 1" I bought a domain, reserved a Cafepress shop name (by opening a basic shop for free), decided on a color pallette for my first few collections, completed several designs (222 to be exact!), created a logo for my shop, created graphics for the web site, uploaded and tagged all of my images, upgraded my shop to a premium shop, customized my shop, ordered pillows to photograph, and put the shop together piece by piece and it continues to grow.

Now time to start spreading the word, which is where I'm at right now. Being that I thought this through at the very beginning, I have some ideas of how I'll go about it. I will keep you updated on my progress. It will take some trial and error and I'll continue to massage the look of my site and it's designs and marketing methods, but it's a good start and I'm excited to see what comes of it.

Do you have a unique method or approach to designing for Cafepress?