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aw, c’mon! you guys run a print-dedicated BLOG which i read religiously and you went with cafepress? really? cafepress? is it still 1997? i’m just curious.
1997? Ouch, Michaela. What’s wrong with Cafepress? Do you have a better suggestion? Zazzle? We’re open to suggestions. Seriously.
BTW, the world was introduced to cloned sheep in 1997. It was The Year of the Bio-Multiple.
ok, 1997 was pretty cool. my mistake. i should’ve gone with ‘96 or ‘98. both probably very boring years for printmaking? maybe?
anyway.
ideally you’d spring for some sort of local, totally metal sort-of plastisol setup like: http://www.myspace.com/devilsrainbowprinting
but since nobody has any actual cash dollars to front for t shirts which is nobody’s fault, check out this dorky internet forum thread comparing qualityyyyyy (with like, photos and stuff) of cafepress vs zazzle vs some other places: http://www.t-shirtforums.com/t-shirt-fulfillment-services/t41579.html
and if you every get postcards or whatever printed http://www.overnightprints.com/ has pretty decent prices, and they’re like the only place online that does offset (not shitty digital).
the end
To call 1996 a boring printmaking year, correctly chooses to ignore my BFA thesis show. It rocked and I have the slides to prove it.
Your points are well made Michaela and one we debated, but at the end of the day without capital we turned to cafepress.
If you know of a printmaker or ‘a slacker for hire’ who might want to crank out a few T-shirts for us we could work out a trade that would be mutually beneficial.. lets just say being based out of Eastern PA I’m in touch with a vast grey market for pork products.
maybe you could go with printfection.com? i mean, look at how on the ball they are!
http://www.printfection.com/watchusgame/Impeach-Obama/_s_156829
Wow. Michaela gets the award for our most caffeinated comments ever! Speaking of caffeine: Michaela, may I interest you in a coffee mug?
Recently 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 much 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?