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

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. :-)

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.