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.'"

Comments

Re:Not so unique...

[Oculus Habent]

Cafepress is more broad, without all the buyer customization options. You can changes anything on a customizable piece on Zazzle.

Despite the article's assurance, Zazzle has been around for 5 years, in one form or another. The Copyright on their web page confirms this. Digital Blasphemy used them for posters while they were still in beta back in 2000. While the product selection isn't as broad as CafePress, the customizability of the products is great... Most interesting (IMHO) is the ability to customize a greeting card and add your own text or pictures inside (or outside). There is a good selection of [fairly] reasonably priced options for the posters, too.

Shameless Promotion

Could work, but i doubt it...

[rwven]

Not that this has anything directly to do with google, but think about how many companies have cropped up with new search "technologies" that will be better and more popular than google. How many people here can name any of them that have een covered by /. off the top of their heads? This, i believe, is one of those kinda of industries that is so engrained that everyone likes how it's being done and doesn't want it to change... Amazon and Ebay work great. why will anyone want to go to Zazzle instead? People like to stick with things they know and trust... My prediction is that it will fail. but maybe that's just me. :-)

Re:Could work, but i doubt it...

[SeventyBang]

Go back to the top and read what Zazzle offers - then you'll see why Amazon and eBay can't fill that niche. Amazon and eBay are working to snag the big boys. That's where the big profits are. They started by grabbing everyone, but as time goes along, the ones who provide the most return for the effort are going to be those who turn the most volume.

With Zazzle creating the one-offs of the standard product(s), it's now a vertical market Amazon & eBay won't really worry about until it becomes a nine (or more) figure market. Anyone in such a market which would generate eight or nine figures of annual sales won't complain.

In terms of Google's engine vs. others, I don't think we'll see Google stick to what they have - permanently. They're going to continue to evolve, just as they have as a business.

But...you wouldn't know that to listen to Microsoft's Ballmer. Any references he makes to Google (in public) makes it sound as though they are a one-trick pony: a search engine. And that's very deliberate. If he can keep the mindset "Google == Search Engine" and nothing else -- whenever he's got a microphone in front of him, there will be a persistent dodge away from their other products.

One area where search engines will have to help in searching or data mining is to deal with poor spelling. Things such as "it's" instead of "its" is annoying, but not likely to screw up a search one is making. But when keywords which are germane to a search are not spelled correctly, it doesn't matter which engine you use in today's market - you're hosed. And that's one of the things which detracts a bit from usenet's archives (groups.google) from being an even better research tool for problems. I'm willing to bet, however, most people who post problems to email-based lists don't even think about looking there, and probably don't even know about it.

Re:Clothing from the US?

[Quasar1999]

This may be slightly off topic, but I have to say that most of the clothing that I get from the good ol' US of A, seems to be lacking in quality. Yes I get tons of crap from overseas as well. But when it comes to paying $20+ for a T-Shirt, the 'crap' I get from overseas seems way better than the Made in America shirts of the same price (Look at the crap coming from places like ThinkGeek). And at the end of the day, I don't care where it's made, so long as I get the best bang for my buck.

Now whether this is simply the end retailer jacking up the price of cheap shirts to maximize profits, or if there is just no demand for relatively inexpensive high quality when it comes to American made clothing (I'm talking average, not top of the line designer stuff), I'd take my chances waiting for something to ship from overseas.

I'm all for not supporting child labour, etc. But I'm also for not being screwed over, and when I pay more for something that's of worse quality, I know I wouldn't feel to patriotic if I was an American. I think the auto industry was seeing the same sort of trend, cheaper better imports... they seem to have started to adapt, but I don't see clothing manufacturers following their path...

deviantART

[De Lemming]

Another difference with Cafepress: Zazzle seems to promote interaction through its community. "Zazzle is home to contributors who are individual artists, photographers, designers and creative consumers worldwide. As a contributor, you can choose to make your creations public through a Zazzle gallery, where anyone can browse, comment or connect with you."

This reminds me of deviantART, which has a huge artist community. The community can interact through the deviantART website (forums, chat, they organise contests,...), and they even have meetups for people to meet in real life. Artists also can sell their works as quality prints in a range of formats, with glossy or matte finish, even framed. They also have stuff like mouse pads, mugs, puzzles,...

Cafepress Has Been Growing and Changing

[Fricka]

I have designs up with Zazzle, with Cafepress, with silkscreen partners -- and I also have my own production capabilities in which I use the processes both Cafepress and Zazzle use to produce items.

"the Zazzle shirt is more comfortable because it doesn't have a big iron-on patch where the artwork is." Cafepress never used iron-on patches but they have used heat transfers (not available in mass market stores) in which a carrier is used for ink. For the past several years they have been hand trimming the carrier to fit the designs. The trimming is good enough that some customers have mistaken my Cafepress produced products for silkscreen products.

However, Cafepress is also in beta testing stages for a direct to print process which is essentially printing directly to the items... ink only where ink belongs -- and it looks and feels fantastic.

Zazzle's Price Structure "The Zazzle shirts are a bit more expensive, though: about $2 more than comparable CafePress shirts." And sometimes as much as $7 more per shirt if you count Cafepress' offer of their Value T-shirt.

Pricing is the part that gets to me as an artist. The Zazzle shirts are more expensive to my customer and yet I get less per shirt from a Zazzle sale than from a Cafepress sale.

Additionally... Zazzle doesn't give me any bonus for selling more items while Cafepress has a bonus commission program which makes it worth it to put out the extra marketing effort.

Finally, Zazzle doesn't let me change the retail prices of my products. There are many times when I'll do a custom design for someone or make a "joke t-shirt" where I want to give my customer a deal and take a little bit off from my profit end to pass along to them. I can't do that on Zazzle. And, on the other side of the coin, I can't charge more for artwork that took me months to complete versus days. This makes a lot of difference to artists who are creating posters and framed prints.

Zazzle's Portal vs Cafepress's Portal Perhaps you haven't been to Cafepress lately but they have changed it to become a shopping destination as well as an artist's destination. Their home page gives you two choices, either sell or shop. They have a whole Marketplace section now as well. I think this has a lot to do with the attention they (as a company) received during the political election and from various other hot topics. In the past though, Cafepress was definitely less of a shopping destination. I didn't count on them to provide many customers. These days I can track sales that came from their directory.

Final thoughts: Cafepress' wider selection of apparel styles, non clothing products (you can sell books and CDs for instance), and seasonal stuff was a real bonus for me to use them. However, the pricing and ability to customize my own store front were the real reasons to make Cafepress my primary supplier over Zazzle.

In the end though, producing items yourself is the best way to go. I've been moving more and more in that direction. Meanwhile, I don't mind if Zazzle gets a little stronger due to this attention, it will just give me and my customers more choices.

A bad Zazzle experience...

[GI Jones]

The idea behind Zazzle is great, but service totally sucks. I created a shirt and place an order for like 13 shirts as a surprise gag for a friends out-of-town graduation.

There was no way to guarantee when shipping would occur. They had some process (I forget what it entailed, maybe paying for priority shipping) that allowed you to jump the line and get priority printing. I followed the process and sent several emails through their online forms telling them that if I could not get the shirts before a specific date, I needed to cancel the order.

Well, with something like a two week lead time, I watched my order and my status never changed. I sent follow up email after follow up email trying to get someone who could tell me about my order.

Eventually, I had to research the company, find out where in California they were located and then do a company lookup for their phone number (you can't find any of that information on their website).

I finally tracked someone down via land line and they checked on my order. I called to let them know that if the order wasn't finished, I would have to cancel it. The sales guy told me that the order was finished several days prior and some glitch prevented it from shipping and it was sitting in the warehouse.

He then told me that come hell or high water it he would get it to me before I left town. I told him I was leaving town at 1:00 PM on a Friday and he said, no problem.

Well, then next day I called to check up and I was told that it failed to make it out the door because of some other glitch, but to be assured that it was possible to still receive it before I left town.

Well, Thursday evening, I get a confirmation that the item shipped. When I looked at the detail I noticed that it wasn't sent as a "deliver before 10AM" parcel and that I shouldn't be expecting my package until 4PM.

On Friday, I logged in to track the package and sure enough, another snafu caused DHL to misdirect the package and I would not receive it until Monday!

Well, I left for the graduation sans t-shirts and I got a package on Monday for about $150 worth of now-useless t-shirts.

After a month of leaving messages and trying to get an RMA, I gave up and realized I just got sacked by Zazzle.

Now a part of Google or not, I will never use them again.

Just my $0.02 --