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Google Investors Find New Project
Greg Linden writes:"According to ZDNet, the investors behind Google are at it again. John Doerr and Ram Shriram are investing in Zazzle, a company targeting mass customization by allowing shoppers and store owners to create individually tailored clothes, prints, and other items. For example, customers can choose an image from a large image library, design a T-shirt using the image with online tools, and then have the T-shirt delivered to them. Lands' End, CafePress, and other online clothing stores offer similar mass customization services on a small scale, but Doerr clearly believes that there is a substantial opportunity 'for every individual who wants to create products that are as unique as they are.'"
I've used both CafePress and Zazzle to have T-shirts printed up with a logo on the front and a simple graphic on the back. The Zazzle T-shirt is of much higher quality. You get a larger area in which to print your graphic with Zazzle, and the Zazzle shirt is more comfortable because it doesn't have a big iron-on patch where the artwork is. The Zazzle shirts are a bit more expensive, though: about $2 more than comparable CafePress shirts.
Compared to CafePress, Zazzle makes it much harder to sell your stuff online in a self-contained space. I think this is where the missions of the two sites diverge. CafePress is basically a site designed to help you set up your little store to sell branded schwag. It is a portal for personal sites. Nobody goes to cafepress.com to shop; they end up on a specific CafePress store that has been linked from somebody else's site.
But Zazzle wants to be an entity unto itself, and it portrays itself as a clearinghouse for all sorts of printed artwork. If you want to make the items you design on Zazzle available to the public, you have to give Zazzle resale rights to the artwork in perpetuity, with the agreement that you will receive a 10% royalty on any items that are sold. Zazzle wants you to become part of their big community.
If you go to cafepress.com, you see a pitch that basically says, "We'll help you sell it yourself." If you go to zazzle.com, you see a pitch that says, "Look at the cool stuff Zazzle sells. Why not contribute?"
I prefer the quality of the printing process (again, I only have experience with T-shirts) on Zazzle, but I wish it had the selling flexibility of CafePress.